Welcome Back, Cipher
by William Easley
Summary: June, 2016: The Mystery Twins are settling back into the routine of Gravity Falls. Wendy and Dipper plan a camping trip, Mabel plans a birthday celebration for the Grunkles, and young Billy Sheaffer plans to visit for the first time. Or is it the first time? Thanks to FalingStars5683 for the great cover image, used by permission!
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note:_ I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.

 **Special thanks to FallingStars5683, who liked the story well enough to do an illustration and to give me permission to use it for the cover image!**

* * *

 **Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 5-17, 2016)**

* * *

 **1: Your Screams Were Your Ticket Out**

Sunday and Monday were days off. Wendy and Dipper hung out—at the Arcade, at the movies, on a shopping drive over to The Dalles—and nothing especially weird happened. For a change.

They planned, too. On Monday, as they sat at a fussy little white wrought-iron table in the ice-cream parlor downtown, Dipper said that Mabel had got wrapped up in making plans for Ford and Stan's birthday on the fifteenth. "We'll probably get sucked into that," Dipper said. "She's already called in Sheila and Lorena as consultants."

"Yeah, looks like a busy couple of weeks," Wendy said. She glanced around. They had the corner table in the back, far enough away from others so they could have a private conversation if they kept their voices low. "Hey, man, after that settles down, what would you say to a camping trip? We could go back to Ghost Falls, see if the flooding did anything to the pond there, or the falls. Oh, and there's the hot spring! Wanna go hot-tubbing with me again?"

"I'd love it," Dipper said.

"Yeah, you know these days my memory's not what it used to be," Wendy said seriously. Dipper looked at her in some alarm, but she grinned wickedly, leaned close, and confided, "There's a chance I'll forget my bathing suit. We might have to . . . you know, rough it." She wiggled her eyebrows.

Dipper almost choked on his vanilla shake. "We are gonna—"

"Shh, don't over-react. We'll keep our vow, right," Wendy said, her grin broadening. "But, hey, hot-tubbing—not any different from skinny-dipping, right?"

Dipper couldn't meet her gaze. He looked at his cup with its barber-pole -striped straw instead. "Uh, I've never, uh—never been."

"You're kidding," Wendy whispered. "That's kinda a teen rite of passage, dude!"

Dipper shrugged. "Not much point in going by yourself," he mumbled.

"Oh, Dip." Wendy was always forgetting that, back home in Piedmont, Dipper hardly ever went out in a group. Unlike Mabel, he just didn't have the knack of making that kind of friend. Still speaking softly, she said, "Well—we'll see about that. I'll take charge."

"Uh, maybe no," Dipper said. "It would just—you know—get me all—"

Touching his hand, she spoke to him telepathically: _Don't worry, Dip. Little mental work-out will take care of that_. Aloud, she added, "Didn't want to make you all self-conscious, sorry. Well, we'll put that on the back burner. But one of these days I want you to bust loose and do crazy things with me. There's stuff teens need to get out of their system while they're still teens."

"Like gluing a toilet plunger to the principal's head?" Dipper asked.

Wendy chuckled ruefully, making a younger teen at the nearest table look around. She touched his hand again so she wouldn't be overheard. _Yeah, yeah, that was kinda dumb of me, considering we were in Mabel Land at the time and it wasn't real anyways. But, hey, that was my old principal, who got into the job 'cause he hated kids, and I did get to do it if only in imagination, and you know what? It worked! Since then I haven't had the slightest urge to glue a plunger to the principal's head._

— _That's good to hear._

 _I know, right? And look how much good it's done me: Wendy Corduroy, high-school graduate, part-time college student, engaged to be engaged, Manager of the Mystery Shack, totally respectable and responsible. Man, I'm in a rut! We GOTTA get wild and crazy, just to cut loose. Promise me you'll help me._

— _Any time, Lumberjack Girl. As long as we don't, you know, cross any major lines_.

 _Shoot. I feel like you're the older, responsible one in this relationship._

— _And when we get cuddly, I get all awkward and feel like I'm twelve again._

 _OK, we can work on that. Like, we'll go camping and see if we can't even things out. Date?_

— _How can I say no? Date._

 _Cool! I'll get ready right after the birthday bash is over. I'll have to find someplace to pack my bikini so's I'll be sure to forget it._

"You OK?" Dora Stannard, the owner of the ice-cream parlor, called from behind the counter.

"He's fine," Wendy said, thumping a coughing Dipper on the back. "Little vanilla shake went down the wrong way."

* * *

"Now," Mabel said, "it's gonna be impossible to surprise them, so my strategy is to pull a double whammy."

She, Lorena, and Sheila were sitting in the parlor of Stan and Sheila's house, just down the hill from the Shack. Stan and Ford were off somewhere doing something mysterious that—in all likelihood—would result in Stan's bringing home a small fortune in gold nuggets. That happened a couple times a year.

Lorena said, "That sounds fine, Mabel. Now tell us what it means."

"It means," Mabel said, her eyes narrowing, "that we'll make my Grunkles think they're going to a quiet little family celebration—just you two and Dipper and me. And just as it gets going, the whole town will jump out and yell 'Surprise!'"

"Where will we do this?" Sheila asked.

"Oh, I'll find a place," Mabel said. "The trick will be to make them think that Dipper and me and you two are gonna surprise them with a quiet family get-together. They'll think they know the secret, see? But they'll go along and pretend to be surprised so they won't hurt our feelings. Then, boom! We'll hit 'em hard when everybody leaps out of nowhere, like Hannibal's army at the battle of Lake Trasimene!"

"Like what?" Sheila asked.

Lorena said, "That's regarded as the greatest military ambush in history. It was during the Second Punic War, and Hannibal defeated the Romans on the shore of the lake, up north of Rome."

"Sounds very military," Sheila said.

Mabel rubbed her hands together. "They won't know what hit 'em!"

"Well, as long as they have a good time," Sheila said. "And there are no casualties."

"I can't promise anything," Mabel said. "Now, as to the possible venues . . . ."

Mabel could, if pressed or if truly interested, be a formidable planner. Oh, her normal mode of operation was to play everything by ear, taking things as they came, thinking on her feet, and being happily random. Her brother Dipper was the obsessive planner, the list-maker, the organizer.

But she could be like him when she needed.

Sometimes, though, Mabel regretted that Dipper found it so hard to be like her.

He needed more spontaneity.

* * *

"Are you sure you're feeling all right?" Billy Sheaffer's mom asked him that Monday morning.

"I feel OK," he told her for what seemed like the dozenth time since he'd had the bad nightmare.

"Because if you're not feeling well, I don't think you should go up to Oregon with the Pineses next week."

"Aw, Mom, I want to go," Billy said. "I really miss Dipper and Mabel. And they told me all these stories about how cool Gravity Falls is. I'm not sick. I just ate something, maybe. I haven't had any more bad dreams."

"You used to have them a lot," his mom reminded him.

Which was true. For as long as he could remember, at times when he felt upset or stressed, Billy had flashes of dreams—fire in a room that he couldn't escape, something crashing into him hard, blackness and unconsciousness and terror. Not so much now. Especially not for the last year.

"I don't have them very often now," he said. "That was just one time. And it's the only time I, you know, wet the bed since I was six years old. I was just a little sick, and I'm better now. Really, I'll be OK for the trip."

"Don't get worked up, Billy," his mom said. She hugged him, and he felt her love and concern in the embrace.

True, she was his adoptive mother. His real, what did they call it, his biological mother—well, he didn't know who she was. Wasn't sure he ever wanted to know. The Sheaffers were kind and loving, and his real mother, whoever she had been, had given him up at birth.

Sometimes Billy wondered if that was because he had been born with only one eye, a freak. Wondered if his biological parents—or maybe just his mother—had been horrified, sickened, afraid of this monster they had given birth to.

Though when he thought about it, he was lucky to have wound up with parents that saw to it that he got reconstructive surgery, that he looked very nearly normal now. And they hadn't done it because he scared them or revolted them.

They'd done it so he would feel more normal, so nobody would point at him and look at him in fear. Or mock him. Or push him around.

Still.

Even with the surgery, even with his realistic prosthetic eye (just cosmetic; science had not come up with a fake eye that could see), he felt different from all the other kids. When his family had moved into the Piedmont neighborhood, into the house once occupied by the Pines family, he had met Dipper and Mabel for the first time. Their family had moved just down to the house on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street, mainly for more room.

And they—were friendly.

They invited him and his sisters to swim in their pool. They took the Sheaffer kids to places where they could have fun. They introduced them around to the other neighbors.

They took his differentness right in stride.

Once, feeling sorry for himself—he didn't even remember what had happened—Billy had miserably confessed to Mabel, "Sometimes I feel like a freak."

"What's wrong with that?" she'd asked. "You think Dipper's normal? Or me?"

They were in Piedmont Park, he remembered, when that had happened, under a big tree. "Yeah," he said. "You're normal, because—"

"Watch this!" Mabel reached inside her sweater, pulled something out, grabbed him around the waist, and zzzzip! They launched themselves like a rocket.

Except it wasn't a rocket. Dangling ten feet off the ground, Mabel had grinned and had loudly pronounced, "Grappling hook!"

When they were safely on the ground again, Mabel asked, "Now, was that normal?"

Billy, who'd been at first terrified, was now laughing. "No!" he'd said. "That was freakish!"

"Yay for freaks!" she'd said, and held up her hand.

He high-fived her, and then he flinched. "Ouch!"

"Shoulda warned you," Mabel said. "I high-five hard! You OK?"

"Yeah, just stung."

"Freaks forever!" Mabel said. "C'mon, let's go find some trouble to get into!"

"We could get caught," Billy said.

"Yeah," Mabel agreed. "But as a friend of mine says—that's what makes it fun!"

Not that their misbehavior was serious. It never had been, all that year. But it was fun, hanging with Dipper and Mabel. And he did miss them.

Because he did, on that first Monday in June, Billy very calmly assured his mom that he was perfectly all right, that a bad dream was still only a dream, and that he wouldn't miss a trip to Gravity Falls for anything.

And, with a little reluctance, she said, "We'll see."

Which, he knew, meant he would get to go after all.

He was so looking forward to it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 8-9, 2016)**

* * *

 **2: The Place You Laughed About**

A heat wave rolled in during the second week in June. By Wednesday, the temperature was above ninety, and the forecast said it would stay at the same level until at least Sunday, when another front should bring more rain—not as much—and cooler temperatures to the Valley.

"Fishin' opener is Saturday!" Stanley announced. "Who's up for it?"

Well, nobody was all that excited, but the lake was cooler than anywhere else in the Valley, Soos decided the Shack could close early so they could all have an afternoon off, and Wendy said, "Might as well." Dipper agreed, and then Mabel agreed. Teek didn't know. Soos wouldn't be along, because he intended to drive over to Portland to meet his Abuelita, whose plane was due in just after noon. "But, you guys can use my boat if you want. It's gassed up and it runs and floats, stuff you want a boat to do, you know."

Stan took him up on the offer. Ford politely declined—"I have a board meeting in Sacramento," he explained. By then they all knew better than to ask, "What board?" They all knew that Ford had taken a super-secret "advisory role" with the Agency, and that at least once a month his duties included chairing a strategy meeting. It was so top-secret that not even Mabel blabbed about it. She did ask anxiously, "You will be back by next Wednesday, though, right?"

"Certainly," he said. "There's nothing anywhere that requires my presence. This is just the normal board meeting, reviewing reports and deciding on budget priorities, that kind of thing."

"So," Dipper said, "not condition red?"

Ford laughed. "Not even yellow," he assured them.

Sheila said she would go along, but Lorena didn't care for fishing—she'd once been married to an amateur outdoorsman, and his and her ventures out onto the water had cured her of any fascination with dunking lures in the water and hoping for a bite.

As the week went by, Dipper saw that, while Mabel and Teek were cordial, there was still tension under the surface. He spoke to Teek about it more than once. "I still don't know," Teek confided. "I mean, I'd really love to go to film school on a full scholarship, but—I don't want to break off with Mabel. She wants me to go to college near her, but—I don't know of any that I can get into and afford. She doesn't want to talk about it right now. Maybe next month, she says. What's up with that?"

"It's Mabel being stubborn," Dipper said. "But it's not a bad sign, really. It's—well, she has to process things. Me, I'd write down a list of pros and cons and weigh them up, you know. But Mabel's more, intuitive? I guess that's the word. She has to sort of think with her feelings, not her brain. Listen, though: Don't let her trick you into anything. She kinda floated the idea of, um, well, seducing you. That wouldn't be good for her, or for you. It's the wrong way to use love." He blushed and laughed. "Listen to me. Man of the world, huh? Dork of the world!"

"I know what you mean, though," Teek said. "I wish Mabel and me could be more like you and Wendy. You guys—you're devoted. Uh, don't want to pry, man, but—do you two ever fight?"

Dipper thought. "No, not really," he said. "We don't agree on everything. But we don't fight. I think I'm too logical for that, and she's too laid back. Besides, she can read me like a book. If we were heading for an argument, I think she'd stop it before it went anywhere."

"How do you get like that?"

 _Um, well, the two of you have to make a wish at Moon Trap Pond, have it go real bad, get turned into water temporarily and then persuade Numina to let you go. She makes touch-telepathy possible, and that smooths your way._ Except he couldn't tell Teek that. Lord, if he told Mabel, she'd be apt to try it. Instead, Dipper said, "Have to be born that way, I guess. Anyway, hbang in there. You mean a lot to Mabel, and I think she'll come around. Give her time. And don't let her talk you into anything you don't want to do."

Teek nodded, but he didn't look cheerful.

On Thursday night, at Ford's request, Mabel, Dipper, and Wendy joined him on an eyebat hunt. "They've been multiplying ever since Weirdmageddon," Ford said. "We have to thin their numbers down."

"Grunkle Ford!" Mabel said, shocked, "we can't _KILL_ them!"

"No, of course not," Ford said. "But we need to capture at least a hundred of them—that's about half their current population, I believe—and put them in stasis. They'll just sleep until we release them again. They won't even know time has passed."

"That's different," Mabel said. "I'm in."

When he got a chance, Dipper asked Ford, "Uh, when do you plan to let them go?"

"I don't," Ford said. "But the possibility exists."

Farmer Sprott had complained that scores of the pesky critters nested in his barn. He drove them out over and over again, but they always came back. That was where, Ford said, they'd lay their ambush. "Unlike true bats," Ford lectured as he drove them over, "eyebats are not nocturnal. They're most active from about an hour before sunup until about nine A.M. and then again from sunset to about nine P.M. We'll try to trap as many as we can as they return to the barn."

"Uh, Dr. P?" Wendy asked. "What are we gonna do with, like a hundred of those things? They'd more than fill up the car."

"Not after we use the shrink crystal," Ford said cheerfully. "If we shrink them down to the size of marbles, we can transport them in a cage I have in the trunk. By the way, Dipper, thank you for finding an application of those size-changing crystals. I remember discovering and describing them, but I never experimented with them."

"Dipper used it to get taller than me," Mabel volunteered. She was riding shotgun, Wendy and Dipper in the big back seat of the Lincoln.

"Indeed?" Ford asked.

"Yeah, it was crazy. We shrunk each other, too—"

"How small?" Ford asked.

"Um, dunno. Brobro?"

"I'd say we were down to three or four inches," Dipper said. "We didn't use it to grow very much."

"Three inches," Ford mused, making the turn to Sprott's farm. "Interesting. I'm not sure there's a lower limit, but the upper limit would be perhaps twenty-five feet or so. Much above that, and you'd be unable to move. Inverse-cube law, you know."

"Oh, yeah," Wendy said. She grabbed Dipper's hand, and he mentally sent her what he knew about the inverse-cube law.

Sprott, a lanky man with a bushy mustache, met them. "Critters ain't come back yet," he said. "I'd sure appreciate it if you'd clear 'em out. They make the cows restless."

Years ago, the twins had used McGucket's memory-erasing ray on him to make him forget, perhaps ironically, his involvement with the Blind Eye Society, but they hadn't changed his other memories. "Raising any pigs?" Mabel asked him.

"Got a few. In the market?"

"Nope," Mabel said. "I have two. Remember, I won one at the fair over at the Mystery Shack."

Sprott looked at her more closely. "Oh, right. Old Fifteen Poundy. How is he?"

"More like Old Four Hundred Poundy," Mabel said.

"Ayup, they do grow," Sprott said.

He showed them the ladder up to the hayloft, and they climbed up and set their trap. Wendy and Ford hid back against the far wall, while Dipper and Mabel took up their stations on either side of the hayloft door. Ford had brought lanterns with special colored filters—deep red—so the inside of the loft looked like something out of a horror movie.

"Why red?" Mabel asked Dipper.

"Eyebats don't see very far into the red spectrum," Dipper said. "To them, the hayloft will look about as dark as always. They won't suspect anything's wrong."

"Huh," Mabel said. "I did not know that."

"It's why they're not nocturnal," Dipper said. "They see mostly in shades of blue and green, and after twilight ends, they can't navigate very well unless there's a full moon."

"How do you know all this?"

"Grunkle Ford told me."

"And how does he know?"

"Experiments," Dipper said, carefully avoiding the word "dissection."

They didn't bother whispering—as far as anybody could tell, eyebats were deaf—and Dipper went on to explain that, contrary to popular belief, dogs were not color-blind, but just saw a different spectrum of colors: "They see reds as brown, orange as a dusky yellow, yellow pretty much the way we do, green as gray, but lots of shades of blue."

"That's almost interesting," Mabel admitted.

Twilight had not yet faded when the first three eyebats flew into the hayloft. Lacking feet, they didn't hang from the ceiling quite the way true bats did, but they did have hooked claws at the joint of their bat-like wings, and they clung to the rafters with these. More and more came fluttering in, hooked on, and soon the ceiling looked as though it were covered by clusters of huge grapes. By the time full dark had fallen, the number of eyebats had trailed off.

Ford called from the darkness: "Did you keep count?"

"I lost count at a hundred and ten," Dipper called back. "I'd guess maybe a hundred and thirty or forty, though."

"That's adequate. Drop the net."

"OK, Mabel, one, two, three—pull!"

The plan wasn't to trap the creatures inside a net, just inside the hayloft. The fine-meshed net rolled down and Dipper and Mabel tied it off to keep the eyebats from escaping through the open hayloft door.

Then Ford and Wendy switched on two unfiltered lanterns. The light disturbed the eyebats, who moved and crept, bumping into each other. Ford and Wendy came out of hiding, and Ford opened the cage. "Stand well back," he cautioned. "I don't want to accidentally shrink you!" He placed a cardboard shield pierced with a rectangular opening at one end of the cage, set the cage so the back of it was close to the netted-off hayloft door, and then switched on a specially colored light, shining through the cage and out through the cardboard cutout.

"Now, Wendy!" he said.

"Take this, eyebat guys!" Wendy said. She fired off a photographer's flashgun.

The startled eyebats dropped from the ceiling and whirled. They spotted the light shining through the cardboard shield opening—Ford had designed it to mimic morning dawn-light—and they fled toward it. They had to pass a gauntlet: Ford, Dipper, and Mabel each held shrink-ray flashlights, and as the bats headed toward what they thought was dawn, they shrank.

Marble-sized or a little smaller, they mistook the cardboard opening to the barn door and fled through it—only to find themselves in a fine-mesh wire cage. When they started to struggle out again, Dipper closed the cage door. "How many are still out?" Ford asked.

They counted six, zipping around the loft like frightened bumblebees. Ford distributed butterfly nets.

"This is fun!" Mabel said, wading through a pile of hay and swiping at the remaining free eyebats.

It took half an hour, but they got all of them—turned out to be seven, not six—and put them in a glass jar with a punctured lid. Ford assumed the eyebats breathed, but he didn't know how.

They lowered the cage—where the eyebats now clung to the ceiling and walls, apparently determined to sleep—down from the hayloft with a rope and pulley. After carefully triple-locking it, Ford stowed it in the trunk of his Lincoln.

"To my lab," he said.

They drove back to the Shack, went down to the third lab level, and Ford put the eyebats, cage, jar, and all, into a sort of locker the size of a floor safe. He switched an attached device on, studied the dials, and said, "There. Safely and humanely contained. What about the other eyebats?"

"Folks say there's not another big nest of them," Wendy told him. "Just, you know, little clusters here and there. Some up in the caves near Needle Falls, a few deep in the woods. Sprott's barn seemed to be the big breeding place."

"Good. Then we've culled the flock. We'll see how the population goes from here on. I suspect these things leaked in from another dimension—not from the Nightmare Realm, because they were here already when I first moved to Gravity Falls. If I could find where they came from, I could, ah, repatriate them. Perhaps."

"Just don't hurt them," Mabel said.

"Certainly not."

By then it was nearly midnight. As Wendy prepared to go home and Ford to return to the McGuckets, where he and Lorena were still living, Ford said, "Oh, Mason—I keep forgetting to tell you this, but I've copied my Journal 5. Fiddleford has agreed to maintain my back-up copies, but if you want to read it, feel free to drop in. And would you three be willing to help Lorena and me move? We plan to do it just after the Fourth of July. Dan has our new house almost completely ready, and after a few finishing touches, we'll be leaving the McGuckets in peace."

"They'll be so lonely," Mabel said.

Ford smiled. "Not as much as you'd think. Their son Tate is planning to marry his fiancée, and they'll be moving into the wing Lorena and I, and Stan and Sheila, have been staying in over the past few years. I think the McGuckets are going to be very happy."

"Yay," Mabel said. "I'm glad somebody's happy this summer."

Ford beamed and thanked her, but Dipper heard the undertone in her words.

And it bothered him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 10, 2016)**

* * *

 **3: The Names Have Changed**

Friday night. Date night. Danny and Pacifica asked Mabel if she and Teek wanted to double-date—there was a dance over in Hirschville. Mabel asked Teek, who said sure, he'd love to go. Grenda wouldn't go—she was engaged to Marius, who lived in Austria and only got to the States a few times a year—but Candy and Adam wanted to go. As for Wendy and Dipper—"No, thanks. Movie night," Wendy said.

"I hope they have a good time," Dipper told Wendy. "Maybe they can patch things up yet."

"I'll try to have a talk with Mabel," Wendy said. "I think maybe she's cooled down enough not to resent it if I try to open the subject with her."

"Why would she resent it?" Dipper asked. "You're, like, her confidante. I mean, she always looks up to you because you've had more, uh, experience and all."

"Thanks for being so delicate," Wendy said, grinning. "You know, one time she asked my advice about breaking up with a guy—"

"Teek?"

"No, dude, this was a long time back. I think it was when she got mixed up with Gideon when you guys were like twelve. Anyhow, she was out on the porch, chewing on her hair—"

"Ugh!" Dipper said. "I kinda forgot she used to do that when she was upset. Sorry, go on."

"Anyway, I sat down next to her—this was quitting time—and she asked if I'd ever broken up with a guy. I started listing them—Stony Davidson, and so on. Before I got to the end of the list, she thanked me—" Wendy's eyes narrowed. "Wait a minute. I just got a flash of something. Take off your shirt."

"What?" They were still in the gift shop—they'd just locked up, and no one else was there, but still—"Wendy, uh, what's on your mind?"

"I'm not gonna jump you right here!" Wendy said. She reached out and tugged at his shirt tail. "Come on, I want to see you in your skin!"

"Couldn't this wait until—"

"Nope!" Wendy grasped his shirt and pulled it up to his neck. He reached behind his head, grabbed the neck of the shirt, and pulled it off.

"OK," he said. "Now what? You want to take off yours—"

She shoved his shoulder. "Get out of town. OK, put it back on. I just had a crazy idea—"

Dipper tugged his tee shirt back on, and then blinked. "You were looking for tattoos!"

"Yeah," Wendy admitted. Crazy idea. When I was barely a teen—maybe just before that, I don't remember exactly—I kinda-sorta dated a guy who had all these tattoos all over his arms and even neck and, I think chest. Well, not dated, really. Or dated for about five minutes or some deal. Now that I remember him, he reminded me of—couldn't be."

"I asked you to join me and be a biker chick," Dipper said.

"No! Oh, my God! Time travel?"

"Time travel," Dipper said. "And I was disguised."

"You let me break up with you, not vice-versa!" Wendy said, laughing. "I thought you were such a tough-lookin' guy!"

"Well," Dipper said, "I was sixteen, you were twelve. Kinda the opposite of when we first met when I was twelve. I sort of saw what you meant when you told me you were too old for me!"

"And then there was the time when I was five and you saw me and Tambry on our trikes—" She hugged him. "That means I met you three times in all!" She kissed his nose. "The old saying must be right. Third time's the charm!"

He put his palm against her cheek. _First time was the charm for me, Lumberjack Girl_.

— _I'm glad it was, Big Dipper. Hey, let's have our movie night here tonight._

 _Why here? Wouldn't we be more, um, comfortable in your room?_

— _That's the trouble, man. Way I feel right now—I think I just might jump you if there was nobody else around._

 _Hmm. Let me think about that . . .._

She shoved him playfully again, and because he knew exactly how she felt—since he felt the same way—he said, "You're right, Wen. We'll stay here and watch the movie in the parlor."

* * *

Pacifica and Danny showed up around seven and picked up Mabel. Teek was already in the backseat of Pacifica's car, and Wendy and Dipper told them to have a good time. Mabel told Melody, "I'll be back around midnight."

Wendy and Dipper had a bare minimum—so to speak—of cuddling, but they sat on the floor of the parlor, leaning back against the sofa, and it was like old times. In fact, they saw a movie they had watched before _, Nearly Almost Dead but Not Quite._ It had not improved with age. They started giggling at the theme song during the opening credits:

 _They thought they'd spend a romantic night,_

 _Until they saw a horrible sight—_

 _They came shuffling into the light—_

 _Nearly almost dead! But not quite!_

Wendy and Dipper joined in the scat-song refrain: "A dooby dooby doo, a dooby dooby dite, they oughta be dead, but they just ain't quite!"

Wendy leaned against him, laughing her head off. "Oh, man, I haven't seen this crappy movie since that time—was it the first time we laid on my bed to watch?"

"Think so," Dipper said. "Only I was laying on your bra, remember?"

Wendy clapped her hand over her mouth to try to stifle her laughter. "OMG, I do remember! You were like so humiliated! You screamed like a little girl!" She nudged him and whispered, "I got a bra on now, Dip. Wanna lay on it?"

"Shh-shhh," Dipper said. "Soos and Melody are just down the hall."

"I'll be good if you'll kiss me."'

Dipper obliged. "Now watch the movie."

They did, finding it more hilarious this time around. They started supplying alternate dialogue for Chadley and Trixandra: "Trixanda, if the creatures get too close—you can hide in the cleft of my chin!"

"No, I can't, Chadley! I can tell it's only painted on!"

It was a good movie evening. Not as snuggly or physical as their last one, not by a long shot, but—a lot of fun. Good, clean fun. Well, some of their improv dialogue got a little bit racy, not vulgar but, you know, sort of suggestive. "Trixandra, we have one chance of defeating them! Take off your bra!" "Chadley, they're lurching toward us! Now's not the time to cop a feel!" "It's not that, Trixandra! We can use it as a slingshot!"

Like that. Not _squeaky_ clean fun, but—mostly clean, anyway.

* * *

Meanwhile . . . the dance too was fun, not as lively as some Mabel had attended, but OK. No live band, just a DJ, and the music tended to be so last year, but still. She danced with Teek—of course, six times in all—but she also danced with Danny ("Tell me, how's life as a reformed vampire?") and with about four other guys who asked her. She and Pacifica even danced together—fast dance, no touching, very athletic, though. And Adam, Pacifica's ex and Candy's current, asked for one dance toward the end. He asked her, "Is Paz happy?"

That was a difficult one. "Pretty happy," Mabel said. From their sleepover gossip, she knew that Preston, who was trying to be reformed himself, occasionally slipped back into being the control freak. And he was working too hard—the Northwests were not poor by any measure, but to Pacifica's great disappointment, Preston had decided to cancel their June vacation. It would have been to Hawaii, where Paz had never been, but pressure of work made Preston decide he had to stay put.

However, Danny seemed nice and barely ghoulish at all. True, he had dispelled a few of Mabel's illusions about vampires—"Nobody sparkles. And sunlight is just sunlight. Vampires can walk around in it fine. Now, though, I have to worry about sunburn." Still, dancing with even a former vampire had its charms.

"How about you?" Mabel asked Adam.

He shrugged. "I think I was just a place-holder anyway," he said. "Someone to hang with until someone more interesting came along. I'm fine with it. I still like Paz, but we didn't have the right chemistry."

That was nearly the last dance of the evening, and it put a damper on Mabel's mood. They left before eleven—Paz and Danny had to drop off Mabel and Teek, after all—and though Mabel sat close to Teek and held his hand, she was wondering about that chemistry bit. How did you tell? What was the litmus test of love? There had been so many times that she was sure Teek was the one—the one and only, come to that. And she still felt that way, deep down.

But did _he_? She wished she knew, but she didn't want to ask. It was the kind of problem Dipper never had, because he and Wendy and their mental voodoo telepathy solved all of that. She wanted Teek to be the one and only and forever one.

Then why did she feel antsy and a little scared?

Though it would have made logistic sense to drop Teek off first, Paz drove to the Shack. Teek, ever the gentleman, got out and walked Mabel to the door. "Well—I had a good time," he said, holding both her hands and squeezing them.

"I enjoyed it, too," she said softly. "Teek—thanks for letting me have some time and space."

"I guess you need it," he said. He leaned forward, but then hesitated.

What the heck. Mabel kissed him—firm on the lips, no tongue, not in their top ten—and whispered, "I want us to be like this, Teek. Just give me a little more time."

"OK, " he said. "Good night. You know I—how I feel."

He opened the door and saw her in.

She closed the door, leaned against it, and heard the car door shut and the engine start up.

And then she balled her fists. _He could've said "I love you" instead of "you know how I feel!"_

But then—she could have said the same thing to him.

What had Stan told her once, when she had got herself into some difficulty and didn't see a way out? "Pumpkin, word of advice—when you find yourself in a hole that's deeper than your head, it's time to stop diggin'." True, he had then shrugged and added, "But what do I know?"

That was the trouble. She'd dug herself in, oh, real good. Maybe she shouldn't have waved her arms and yelled when Teek first told her about the scholarship. Maybe she had made too much of a big deal out of the whole thing. But—

"Hey, buddy."

Mabel jumped. She had been leaning back against the gift-shop door and hadn't noticed Wendy slipping in from the parlor. "Oh! You kinda startled me," she said.

"How's the weather out there?" Wendy asked.

"Good, it's good."

"Let's go sit outside and have some girl talk."

Mabel rolled her eyes. "Did Dipper put you up to—"

"Nope. But you've been mopey, and that's not Mabel. Come on, let's go sit on the steps."

They did. It was a nice night, starry, warm, little breeze, crickets making music in the grass. "I guess you know all about it," Mabel said.

"Mm, yeah, that Teek has this chance to go off to school in Florida—"

"Georgia," Mabel corrected. She rolled her eyes. "Why Georgia? Who lives in Georgia?"

"Lotta people, I guess." Wendy leaned back and stretched out her long legs.

Mabel hunkered instead—sitting, but leaning forward, hugging her knees. "Did you and Dipper make out?" she muttered.

"Hey, that's personal," Wendy said. "For the record, though, no, not in any way you'd mean. We watched a dumb movie and made fun of it. Popped some popcorn for a snack. Played a few rounds of an old video game. That's it. How was the dance?"

"Pretty good. The music was kinda lame. Nothing new."

"I've been to dances like that, yeah. DJ, right?"

"Yeah."

"Mm-hmm, well, they kinda get hung up on a personal play list sometimes, you know. Wanna talk about Teek?"

"He's too _nice_ ," Mabel heard herself complain. She blinked. "Why did I say that?"

"Um, 'cause you want him to get mad and fight this out with you?"

"No, I don't!" Mabel paused. "Uh . . . do I?"

"Sorry, Mabes, can't read your mind."

"I . . . can't either," Mabel admitted. Out in the parking lot some bugs were whirling around the lights. She watched them for a few seconds, spinning around in a confusing cloud, just like her thoughts. "I don't know _what_ I want. That's messed up. I mean, normally I just go ahead and do . . . whatever and then deal with the consequences when I have to."

"You want to break up with Teek?"

Mabel's face felt hot, and she blurted, "No! I—no, I don't. I really don't. But I don't know if I could handle four years of being separated from him. Long-distance relationships suck!"

"Are you telling me?" Wendy asked. "Me and Dip make a go of it somehow."

"Yeah, but—you know, in an emergency you could get together in like two or three hours."

"Oh, yeah, and if Teek was off in Georgia and you were in California, it would take, like four or five for you two to get together."

"I guess," Mabel said. "But it's so _far_. Like three thousand miles."

"OK," Wendy said. "I wasn't gonna tell you this until later, but—I didn't make a mistake about Florida, I already knew it was Georgia. Atlanta, right? The Georgia College of Arts and Film or some deal?"

"Yeah."

"Dip and me Goggled it and located it on the map. It's not right in downtown Atlanta. It's like, south of the city a ways, past their big airport. Now, on the north side of the city there's another school, the Savannah College of Art and Design. SCAD."

"I thought Savannah was on the ocean."

"Yeah, maybe two hundred miles from Atlanta, I guess. But for some reason, there's a big branch of SCAD right in Atlanta, off Peachtree Street, according to the map. If you went there, you and Teek would be maybe forty minutes apart."

"But then I'd be three thousand miles from you guys!" Mabel said.

Wendy admitted, "Yeah, there's that."

"What should I do?"

Softly, Wendy said, "Mabel, I can't tell you that. You have to think about how you feel, dude. What are the most important things to you? Hey, no matter what, you probably won't want to go to college year round. There's always summer—in Gravity Falls. You and Teek could always be together for the summers, and you both love it here."

Mabel squirmed. "Yeah, but it won't be the same."

"It's _never_ the same," Wendy said, She reached out and brushed her palm over Mabel's hair. "It's not the same this summer as it was when you were twelve. Things change, Mabes. Faces and names change. People come into your life and others move out. I haven't even seen Thompson in, like, months. Tambry calls me maybe once a week. Nate's off somewheres. But now there's Little Soos and Harmony and Melody. People go, people come. Things just . . . change. You have to ride with the waves and not let 'em drown you."

Mabel sighed. "I wish I had somebody to just tell me what to do."

"You do, Mabes," Wendy said. "Only that person is you."

They talked a little more before Wendy drove away, heading home. And then Mabel sat under the stars a little longer.

A couple of Gnomes came scampering past. They didn't pause or speak to her. They were probably on the trail of nocturnal vermin. Gravity Falls now employed Gnomes as their chief form of pest control. Once the people of the town had panicked at the very glimpse of a Gnome.

Things change.

Mabel walked around to the pig pen, where both Waddles and Widdles were snoring. "Night, guys," she whispered.

Finally, feeling—not bad, not good, somewhere in the middle—she went inside. Dipper was sitting on the floor in the parlor, asleep and leaning back against the sofa, the TV on and a Monkey Man video game frozen on the screen. Mabel switched off the console and the TV, sat down on the floor next to her brother, and leaned against him until she, too, went to sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, he nudged her. "Better get to bed, Sis," he said, his voice a little hoarse.

"Mmwha?" She yawned. "Time is it?"

"Probably about three."

"OK." She got up as Dipper switched on a lamp and disconnected the game console.

"You have a good time?" he asked her as he stored the game away.

"It was all right."

"Well," Dipper said, "that's a step."

Baby step, maybe. But she didn't say that out loud. She went back to her room, Dipper climbed the steps to the attic, and despite her thinking, _I'm gonna be awake for the rest of the night—_

She pulled a Dipper, didn't undress, just lay down on the bed and pulled a blanket up, and with moments she was asleep and for some reason dreaming about being married to a thousand Gnomes.


	4. Chapter 4

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 12, 2016)**

* * *

 **4: Since You Hung Around**

Gideon Gleeful had turned fourteen not long before. He and Ulva—who was a werewolf, though she had her transformations under control and, along with her mother, had been expelled from the pack—were, everyone in Gravity Falls supposed, boyfriend and girlfriend.

He liked to think so. Ulva had come into his life the previous year. In fact, an insane and completely feral werewolf had bitten Gideon, and only the intervention of Stanford Pines and Wendy Corduroy had cured him of the condition—though he still got itchy during nights of the full moon. Anyway, Ulva and her mother now lived in a cottage downtown. Her mother, who had led a normal human life before being turned, had readjusted relatively quickly, though healing from some wounds that, had she been merely human, would have been fatal had taken months.

Now she worked as an accountant for Bud Gleeful's companies—the car lot, his first love, plus a garage and an auto-parts store that he owned but did not put his name to. "What's the use of a used-car salesman owning a garage?" he'd ask. "Might give folks the false idea that his cars are not as good mechanically as they ought to be, yes! And my cars are in perfect condition when they roll off the lot!"

And then the front bumper fell off.

Ulva had spent far less time in human form than her mother. She struggled to catch up. At first, she had insisted on sleeping on the floor, curled up in a ball, and naked under a blanket. Gradually she had become accustomed to clothes—shoes were the hardest for her to tolerate, and in summer she was always in sandals, though the cold winters in Oregon had at last got her used to thick socks and ankle boots.

Language had been a problem, too. She was fluent in Wolf. She could hold long philosophical discussions with wolves and dogs, and foxes could understand her, though sometimes they made fun of her accent. Now, it's true that Wolf, though very expressive, is not a complex language. It consists of about sixty phonemes—words, in human terms—but they can be combined and recombined for an infinity of meanings.

Sixty words is low for a human vocabulary, though, not counting parts of Alabama and rural Texas. Just learning to communicate had been a hurdle, and then learning to read came next. But Ulva was just disadvantaged, not stupid. In fact, she had a brilliant mind and made astonishing progress as the months passed. Gideon was ready to enter Gravity Falls High as a freshman come fall. Ulva—well, she could read on a seventh-grade level and she could use language more than adequately (her writing was oddly stilted, as if she had never been formally introduced to contractions).

She wasn't ready for high school. However, Bud called in a favor from Mr. Northwest, who paid it off in the way he was most comfortable—with money, not with actions of personal kindness—and Ulva had a tutor who would continue to guide her. She would, however, have to spend another year in junior high.

"It just ain't fair," Gideon complained. "She'll die without me bein' around every day, every hour!"

"No, I will not," Ulva said. She was having Sunday dinner with the Gleefuls, a regular arrangement. "I will be fine as an independent person in school and we shall see each other every day, yes?"

"It ain't the same," Gideon grumbled. "Daddy, let me take a sabbatical from school and wait for Ulva to catch up."

"Now, darlin'," Bud said, "that just won't happen. I know you and Ulva have, well, a little arrangement as playmates and all, but the school system just won't let a high-school student take a whole year off."

"Dang it," Gideon complained. "What do we pay taxes for? The School Superintendent works for us!"

"You would not send me on the hunt before my fangs had grown," Ulva said, touching Gideon's arm. "I see the wisdom of the human pack. I will catch up by next year. You will see."

But later, as they went for a walk—they always held hands because Ulva found constant wonder in every little thing and wanted to dart across a busy street or, sometimes, chase a squirrel, and he had to hold her back—as they went for a walk in Circle Park, Gideon said, "There's more than one way to skin a cat."

"I chase them sometimes," Ulva said, "but I would never skin one. That is—" she made a weird warbling murmur—"what the Folk call, I don't know the human word. Cruel? Vicious?"

"Those're about the same thing, darlin'," Gideon said.

Ulva nodded. "Cruel and vicious. And also unnecessary. Because what would I do with a cat skin? And a cat without its skin would not be comfortable. And slippery to pet."

"It's a metaphor," Gideon told her.

She brightened. Her tutor had gone over that with her in English back during the school year. "Ah. A form of poetic expression that says one thing is another thing that it really is not for purposes of clarification or illustration. A lie."

"Yeah, I suppose it is a lie, kinda," Gideon said. "But that's beside the point. I just had me a category five brainstorm! You get tutored for how many hours a day?"

"Seven," Ulva said. _Hours_ was another term she'd had difficulty with. The Folk—the wolves, that meant—did not measure time in that way, dividing the day more like time to wake in the sun, time to drink and run, time to wrestle with each other, time to hunt and kill, time to eat, time to look for a mate and then sleep. However, Ulva correlated what the Folk knew and what the humans and their clocks said, and she now understood hours. "We begin at eight and study until twelve. Then we have meat. Then from twelve-forty-five—that is right, is not it? The right way to say? From twelve-forty-five until four we study, with time to break. That is not right."

"Time _for_ a break," Gideon corrected. "But that's not what I was aimin' to say. See, your tutorin' schedule and my high-school schedule ain't too different. Your tutor could come to the high school. Y'all could use one of the counseling rooms, or the library, and have almost the same schedule. You'd start at 7:45 and go until 3:00. Shorter lunch period, but that's OK. And maybe sometimes you could come and set in on classes. I know my daddy can arrange that."

"Then we would be in the same place!"

"Same building. And we could see each other through the day. And then after school I could walk you home."

"I would much like that!" Ulva said, kissing his cheek. "You are smart."

Blushing but smiling, he replied, "Well—I got a reason to be, sugar. It's settled. I'll talk to Daddy about it and see what we can work out. I'm pretty sure the school principal and everybody will agree. Oh, hey, look over there on the bench—Ghost Eyes! Buddy!"

Ghost Eyes, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black pullover, was sitting at a picnic table, tossing peanuts to the birds. "Gideon!" he rumbled back, causing the flock to fly away squawking. "Good to see you, man! Miss Ulva, how are you doing?" He rose—an impressive sight, like a forty-year time-lapse of a redwood growing fifty feet in five seconds—and shook hands with Gideon. "They treating you all right?" Ghost Eyes asked Gideon.

"Fine, just working some things out. How's college?"

"Oh, summer break, man," Ghost Eyes said. "But dig it, I'm on track to get my A.B. in Management next June. Already talked to some prospective employers. I think I'm gonna be a straight solid citizen at last." He and Gideon fist-bumped.

Ulva had been tugging Gideon's sleeve urgently and tilting her head like an eager puppy, she asked, "What should we dig?" She did love digging. The Gleeful front yard was resplendent with flowers in the beds she had personally excavated.

"Just another metaphor, sugar," Gideon said. "Means 'understand.'"

"Squirrel!" Ulva yelped, jerking his hand.

"See you later, buddy!" Gideon shouted as he tried his best to match Ulva's speed.

* * *

Sunday afternoon was Planning Time. Mabel called a meeting in the Shack parlor: Dipper, Wendy, Soos, Melody, and Abuelita. Abuelita, looking tired but radiant after her trip to Mexico, sat in a reclining chair and smiled. The others waited for Mabel, who stood at an easel on which she'd mounted a three-by-three-foot tablet of newsprint. "I suppose you're wondering why I called you all here today," she said, whacking a pointer into her cupped hand. She flipped the first, blank page of the tablet, revealing a page on which she'd sketched puppies, kitties, rainbows, stars, and balloons. A word ran vertically down the center: SURPRISE.

Mabel snapped the pointer against the paper. "Can anyone tell me what this is?" Mabel asked.

"It's a pointer, dawg!" Soos said.

Mabel swiveled and pasted an "E FOR EFFORT" sticker on him. "Good observation, Soos! And what is it pointed _AT_?"

"The paper!" Soos said triumphantly. "I am on _fire_ today!"

"And on the paper the word 'SURPRISE,'" Dipper said. "No, I don't want a sticker, thanks."

"Spoilsport! And what does 'surprise' stand for, can anyone tell me?"

" _Una sopresa_ ," Abuelita said. "It means, something you do not expect but makes you very happy, no?"

"Thank you for your valuable international perspective, Abuelita! Exactly right! But in this case, SURPRISE is also our mission!"

She flipped a page. Now words ran down the page, their initials spelling out SURPRISE:

"Super! Unexpected! Rejoicing! Perfect! Really! It's! Secret! Enjoyment!" Mabel took hold of the corner of the sheet, ready to flip it. "And that spells out—"

"Birthday Party," Dipper said.

Mabel laughed. "Dipper! You're always the brainy one! Tell the others how you figured it out!"

"I sneaked a peek at the next page while helping you set up the easel," Dipper said.

"Points for ingenuity!" Mabel pronounced, flipping the page to reveal the words SURPRISE=BIRTHDAY PARTY. "Our Grunkles' birthday comes up next Wednesday!"

"Ooh!" Soos said. "Because they're twins, right?"

With a dramatic swoosh of her pointer, as if she were casting a spell and earning ten points for Gryffindor, Mabel said, "Exactly! You got it, Soos!"

"Yes! Nailed it!" Soos said with an air-punch.

Mabel waved the pointer for silence. "But the key is that the party has to be super and unexpected! In other words, a surprise! The question before the group is—how do we mobilize to make that happen? I think we all remember last summer and how that birthday celebration was all pffbbtt!"

"Hey!" said Dipper, because she had been right in front of him when she blew her raspberry, "You sprayed me!"

"Walk it off, Broseph! Yes, Wendy, you have your hand up."

"Uh, I think that was 'cause we went out on the ocean to help your friend the merman find his missing wife, right? And Dipper and I, like, nearly drowned, and all that sh—stuff was still coming down on June 15th, right?"

"Right!" Mabel pinned a star sticker on Wendy's flannel shirt. "I mean, Dip and I gave them cards and presents, and we had a nice little meal with them and our Graunties, but their birthday was already over and nobody else celebrated. Not this time! Not on my watch! So—we're gonna invite lots of people and have a great time! First question—where?"

"How 'bout Ford's new house?" Wendy asked. "The upper floor's not furnished yet, but on the main level Dad and his crew moved in and set up all the kitchen appliances, and there's a great big dining room that's furnished now, and a den and living room with furniture, and it's got a great back deck and the yard's crazy spacious. Ford and Lorena aren't expecting to move in until after July 4th, so it should be easy to get them out there on Wednesday. Dad'll tell 'em, like, he wants their approval for some change in decor or some deal, and that'll get them there."

"Yeah," Dipper said. "And guests can park up in the Shack lot, so nobody will be suspicious—it's just a short walk downhill. Why don't we schedule it for 7:30, an hour after the Shack closes?"

"I like the way this is going," Mabel said. "Now, about Grunkle Stan and Sheila—"

"'Scuse me," Wendy said again. "This would be a lot easier if we let Sheila and Lorena in on it."

"Aw, no, dude," Soos said. "I think the ladies should be just as surprised as the twins."

"Soos has a point," Dipper said.

"OK, OK," Mabel said. "Who wants to surprise our Graunties as well as our Grunkles?"

Soos and Dipper raised their hands.

"Who wants to involve them in our planning?"

Melody and Abuelita did. Wendy abstained.

"It's unanimous!" Mabel said. "We involve them!"

"It's really for the best, dude," Wendy murmured to Dipper, who shrugged.

"Yeah, you can't beat a unanimous decision," Soos said. "That's nearly everybody."

"Besides," Mabel said smugly, "I've already talked this over with both of them. I just need to give them the details now!"

With the location set, Mabel next distributed a tentative guest list—all of Stan's poker buddies, and the McGuckets, of course, and lots of people from town. "That's thirty," she said. "Who did I leave out?"

"Um, how about Pacifica's mom and dad?" Dipper asked. "You've got her and Danny down, so—"

"Let's table that until I get Pacifica to see if they'd even come," Mabel said. "If she says go for it, they're in."

"Nice that you invited Lazy Susan," Wendy said.

"Yeah, I like her," Mabel agreed.

They came up with a few other names, for a total of thirty-six. Then—"Refreshments!" Mabel said. "Teek says he'll do the grilling—is the barbecue grill out back of the house ready, Wendy?"

"Oh, yeah!" Wendy said. "Dad and his crew already tested it out. It's fine, and it's big. All you need will be the charcoal and the goodies to cook."

"I will make some specialties," Abuelita said.

"Yum! Great!" Mabel said. "Now about the cake—"

"I'll bake it," Melody said. "Provided you decorate it."

Again Mabel whooshed the pointer. If she had been a Hogwarts student, she might have managed to levitate Melody. "Lady, you got yourself a deal!"

In all, the meeting lasted for two exciting but exhausting hours. "I hope," Soos said when Mabel gaveled it to a close, "the party is as much fun as the planning was, dawgs!"

Narrowing her eyes, but smiling, Mabel said, "Make it so, Mr. Soos! Make it so!"

"These," said Dipper, "are the voyages of the tourist trap Mystery Shack."

They went their separate ways after that. Mabel commandeered the table and laid out paper to sketch the cake she had in mind. Abuelita and Melody went to tend to the young Ramirezes. Soos, who'd driven to Portland and back the day before, settled in for an afternoon nap.

And Dipper and Wendy took a walk in the woods. For no particular reason, they wandered to the spot where Bill Cipher's physical body—changed to stone when he entered the Mindscape during Weirdmageddon—had crashed to earth.

"There he is," Dipper said. The one-eyed triangle with his tall hat and his outstretched hand still rested there, in a small clearing in the forest.

Wendy shaded his eyes. "Why's he so shiny?"

"He does look a little glittery," Dipper said, ducking as something whizzed by his face. "Whoa! Was that a bee?"

"Just a rain beetle," Wendy said. "They're harmless. Ugh, look, there's a dozen of 'em creeping over the statue!"

Dipper saw they were, little crawling rounded dark dots. A couple took off and a couple more landed. Dipper went in for a close look. The effigy had weathered a little, and dull green moss had crept into the crevices, but—hmm. The stone, which looked like a coarse-texture granite, had turned a faint metallic yellow in streaks. Almost as if it were turning to gold.

The universe is a hologram. Reality is an illusion. Buy—

 _Gold._

"Uh-oh," he said.


	5. Chapter 5

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 12/13, 2016)**

* * *

 **5: Lead You Back where She Needs You**

If this event were a Good Enough for TV movie, the title might be _The Rehauntening._ Or maybe _I'm Not Spooking to You!_ Or—this one might work— _Trees Company._ Any of those would be a decent title for a movie so crappy that, without intending to be funny, it winds up being hilarious. Redheads and shy kids everywhere would get a kick out of such a movie. Especially if they cuddled under a blanket and watched it together.

Except the event was not a movie, but real life, and it didn't take place on a movie set. It happened for real in Pacifica Northwest's bedroom. And the blonde didn't find it remotely amusing.

She'd turned in around eleven, and for ten minutes she had snuggled under the warm covers and thought hard about Danny—because sometimes if she did, the former vampire boy showed up in some pretty delicious dreams, sweet but thrillingly wicked dreams. Smiling in anticipation, after a quarter of an hour Pacifica dozed for a short time and then slept deeply.

For all of about forty minutes. Then, as the town clock chimed midnight—well, that's not accurate because it no longer _chimed_ , since the people of Gravity Falls didn't much like being woken up at midnight to the tolling of chimes that, for some reason, no matter how often they were tuned or what music they were supposed to sound, played only the opening bars of Chopin's "Funeral March." You know the one, the slow, lugubrious dum-dum-da-dum, da-da-DUM-da-dum-da-dum." Some people imagined lyrics, though the march has none.

Some heard "Put on your shoes, for your time has come to go." Others: "Dig up the ground, say, just how tall are you?" Some this, some that, some the other. Personal lyrics that nobody liked.

In short, not one living soul in Gravity Falls enjoyed being roused by a jaunty—well, not _jaunty_ , _creepy_ is a better word, _le mot juste_ —creepy tune, an intimation of mortality ringing out over the town at the witching hour of night, so the citizens silenced the chimes right around 1975.

Though disconnected from the electricity and the control board, and with no earthly means of producing a sound, somehow the chimes kept right on chiming anyway. "You can't shut us up, for your time is running out." That's what the Fallers heard.

When simple disconnection failed to work, the townspeople went up in a mob and ripped the chimes out of the tower physically (they were not bell-shaped bells, but tubular bells, the kind a good exorcism just howls out for) and buried them in a special extra-wide, extra-deep grave in the cemetery.

That did the trick. Oh, sure, to this day, teens sometimes go out there at midnight and lay their ears to the ground to listen for the ghostly, ghastly melody. Some say they hear the "Funeral March" (Thompson said that); others call the people who say that rude names (Robbie called Thompson a colorful assortment of such rude names).

Anyway, no audible chimes rang from the clock tower on that June night, but the two clock hands were straight up, as though praying for heaven's mercy, when midnight arrived.

And then, when the last silent chime of midnight had not sounded, Pacifica heard someone softly calling her name.

"Pacifica . . . ."

"Mngl," she responded, turning over. "Lemmysleep."

"Pacifica Northwest . . . ."

"Mng, goway."

Silence, and she sighed, ready to sink back into a dream of soaring through the star-sprinkled night sky wing-in-wing with Danny, who was a bat at the moment, and who had turned her batty as well.

But then another sound rang out, a sound that jerked her wide awake, her heart beating hard, sweat beading on her forehead.

Though it was not a loud sound.

Just a gentle sort of silvery _ting-a-ling-a-ling._

"No!" she shouted, struggling to sit up.

Oh, sure, in the movies people wake up and sit bolt upright in bed, just like that. You try it. It's not so easy. Pacifica had to scrunch up and twist, move her butt, and shove herself up with braced arms. "You!" she said, and, oh, boy, if words could kill—well, come to think of it, even if they could kill, nothing would have happened.

Because her visitor was already dead, not nearly almost but not quite dead, nor merely dead, but as the little Coroner sang in that over-the-rainbow movie, really most sincerely dead.

Pacifica recognized her spectral visitor instantly. Oh, he now had both his eyes, and his billowy beard was snow-white, not blue flames, and his clothes were no longer ragged, and—this improved his looks the most—he no longer had an axe wedged deep in his head, brains showing through the cleft. His head was whole and uncut. She saw all this in her first glimpse. "I'm sorry, Pacifica," the ghost said, snapping his fingers, and the damned little bell vanished in a _poof_ of smoke.

"You don't know how that makes me feel!" Pacifica raged, clenching her fists, her fury overcoming her shock. "How _dare_ you show up in my bedroom? In my house? And ring a damn _bell?_ If you haven't noticed, this isn't the Northwest Mansion! It's a farmhouse! And you and your friends didn't build it, and my dad has townspeople in all the time, and Dr. McGucket even lets the homeless and orphans come into our old house three or four times a year and tries to find them homes and jobs and—damn it, just go away!"

"I'm not haunting a house," the ghost said gently. "Just you. I'm haunting you."

"Oh, come on! I let the people in!" Pacifica reminded him. "You said it yourself—I'm not like the other Northwests! Why don't you go back to—wherever you go?"

"I never leave the valley," the ghost said. He wasn't frightening at all, really—just a very big, muscular man floating like a helium balloon about a foot off the floor, gently bobbing, his body translucent and glowing a rather appealing soft blue. "Listen, please. I have a favor to ask."

"Oh, fine!" Pacifica said, rolling her eyes. "You help a ghost out _one_ time, just one time, and he expects you to be at his beck and call every minute of the freaking day! And night!"

"You have something of mine," the ghost said gently.

Pacifica almost spluttered in her anger. "What? I do not!"

"You do. I left it behind in the manor when you freed my spirit from the curse of haunting Northwest Mansion. You remember."

"Your hat?" she said, frowning. "After the party, our butler picked up this horrible old raggedy hat with tongs. No, wait, that was McGucket's, and he got it back. I give up."

"In life," the ghost reminded her, "I was a lumberjack."

"What does that have to do with any—" Pacifica broke off, her eyes widening. "Oh. That."

The ghost nodded. "Yes. That. You took it. Where is it now?"

She blinked. "Don't _you_ know? I thought ghosts knew, like, everything!"

The ghost patiently shook his head. "It doesn't work like that. Where is my property now?"

Pacifica swung her legs off the bed. "Can I turn on the light?"

"I don't mind."

She clicked on her bedside lamp. It had a pink shade. The pink did nothing for the ghost—it was still that pale, translucent blue. However, the tinted light flattered living flesh, and Pacifica almost wished she had makeup on, not that the ghost was attractive to her, but wearing make-up was her habit. She bit her lip. "I . . . think . . . last time I saw it, it was down in the basement? Maybe? I'm pretty sure. Either that or out in the barn storage room."

"You must find it. I need you to take it to someone."

She got mad all over again. "What? I'll try to find it, but _you_ take it!"

"I can't. I'm no longer a vengeful ghost, and I wielded it as a weapon of revenge. In my refined form now, my ghostly fingers would pass right through it." The ghost paused, and then added sorrowfully, "Besides, I cannot appear to the person who must have it."

"Why not? You appear to _me!_ And I don't even like you! Uh, that much."

"Rules bind me," the ghost said mysteriously. "Even in the spirit realm, we have rules. I have family connections still in the flesh. I may watch over them, but only invisibly. I may visit them, but only in dim, unremembered dreams, or in waking hours only on the happiest of occasions for them. Then they may glimpse me and even dimly hear me. Until I depart this plane and go on to the next, in all other circumstances, I cannot make them aware of me."

Pacifica looked at him with deep suspicion. "Depart? Wait, you can leave any time you want?"

The ghost looked upward, as if staring through the ceiling and roof at something invisible to mortal eyes. "Yes. I would just rise and pass into the light."

"Then why don't you—"

The ghost held up a hand, palm out, as if asking for her silence. The eyes, not angry but oddly calm and kind, stared into hers. "Pacifica. Have you ever loved anything more strongly than life itself?"

She blinked. "What? Sure. I mean—probably. I think maybe. Uh, no. I—I don't know."

"If you don't know," said the ghost quietly, "you haven't. I love the forest, Pacifica. As long as I linger in the earthly plane, I can try to protect my forest and help it flourish. Every tree is tied to my ghostly heart by an invisible silken strand. It would be so easy for me to move on—but it is also impossible, moored as I am by a thousand thousand gentle lines of memory and of love."

"You're pretty poetic for a lumberjack," Pacifica said, giving him just the ghost of a smile.

He returned her smile, looking less like a creature hot out of hell and nearly like an earnest but jolly Santa Claus. "I was not a stupid man in life, merely an unlearned one. I would be dull indeed if a hundred and fifty years were not time enough for me to improve my mind. Now. Let's go look, shall we?"

Pacifica fretted, "I can't run around the house at midnight! I'll wake up Mom and Dad. Or Wellington. His room's right next to the stairs."

The ghost exhaled, or appeared to, and a thin blue mist formed around him, a cloud nearly ten feet across. "Step into my phantom haze, and you will pass invisibly and silently all who yet dwell in flesh."

"That sounds creepy."

The ghost sighed. "OK, then put it this way: just stay close to me, kid, and I'll hide you from your folks."

With another smile, she said, "I think I liked it better when you were all poetic."

The ghost actually laughed. "You've got grit, Pacifica! You're a girl with sand in your spirit. You are going to make some man an extremely trying and very wonderful wife."

"That," she said, "is up to me." She sighed. "All right, let me put on my slippers. That concrete floor is cold, even in summer."

She found the soft scuffs and, walking within the penumbra of mist, she went downstairs, together with the ghost. She opened the basement door, fumbled for the one dim light just inside, which showed the stairs but nothing beyond, and said, "Watch out. These steps are pretty steep."

"I wouldn't want to break my neck," the ghost agreed.

"Funny."

"Thank you." At the bottom of the stairs, the ghost looked around in the gloom and darkness. "This place is a mess. I'd never have let the loggers in my camp stow their gear higgledy-piggledy like this!"

Pacifica clicked on the basement lights and grimaced a little at the stacks of boxes and clusters of possessions too good to throw away and yet not good enough to use. "Yeah, we keep meaning to come down here and straighten things out, but you know—life happens."

"I wouldn't know about that."

"So you can see in the dark, huh?"

"Comes in handy when your activities are mainly nocturnal."

"All right," Pacifica said. "let's get this done. You take that side, I'll take this."

Pacifica prowled among chipped and damaged bookcases, which now held an assortment of odds and ends—coffee cans jumbled with nails and screws, one whole shelf of outdated remote controls for electronics the Northwests no longer owned, another shelf stacked with back issues of _The Billionaire's Buddy_ magazine, more shelves with Pacifica's old dolls, a broken miniature table at which she'd served tea to her imaginary friends when she was six years old. She'd had nothing but imaginary friends for so long that it hurt to remember. Then she saw a—she teared up a little as she picked it up and remembered it, too—a red dog collar with a leash still attached. A memento of her one good friend, anyway, though he had died when she was eight. Oh, yes, she remembered, and the memory ached in her heart.

"Perhaps what we seek is in the barn," the ghost suggested in a kind voice.

Pacifica wiped her eyes and put the dog collar back on the shelf. "Well—not really _in_ the barn. There's an attachment to the barn that used to be a birthing stall, where the mares came to have their colts. We don't breed horses, so it's just a darn old horse shack now. Anyhow, Dad had shelves and racks put in, and now all the gardening and yard tools are stored there. The tools that are still used, I mean. I think if it was there, someone would have noticed by now. Wait, let's look back in this dark corner." With effort, she shoved a dilapidated dresser aside.

In the angle of the wall behind it, worn-out tools, obviously not in recent use, leaned together in a clutter: a short broken-handled hoe, a rake with missing teeth, rusted shears and loppers, a loose, broken chain from a chain saw, and in the very middle of the mess—yes, she saw it.

She clattered among the tools and pulled it out with clinks and clanks, grunting in a very un-Northwest way. "It's heavy."

"It is magical," the ghost said. "It partakes of the physical world and of the ghostly one. You know who must have it."

"I think I do. But tonight?" Pacifica asked. "They'd think I was crazy—"

"Tomorrow is soon enough. But no later than tomorrow! Farewell, Pacifica!" He began to fade.

In a panicky voice, she said, "Wait, wait!"

He brightened again. "Yes?"

"Walk me back upstairs?"

The ghost did smile this time, warmly, broadly. "Certainly. But why?"

"Because I'm afraid!" she admitted, being snippy about it.

"I don't believe it! Pacifica Northwest, afraid of something?" the ghost asked with a chuckle.

"Yes," she said primly. "Mice."

* * *

The father and the two sons all went to work in the mornings—in the summers he was teaching his teen boys his trade—and Pacifica waited up the hill from the house, in her parked car on the shoulder of the road, until his pickup truck pulled out and set off for some part of the forest. Then she started the engine and drove down the hill and into the driveway. With a sigh, she parked, switched off the ignition, popped the trunk, and took out what the ghost had asked her to deliver.

She was almost to the porch when Wendy Corduroy came out wearing a red tank top, black running pants, and red trainers. She carried a gray gym bag and didn't notice Pacifica as she turned back to lock the door. But then Wendy turned again and jumped off the porch and gasped at the sight of the blonde girl standing three feet away with a weapon raised and poised.

"Geeze!" Wendy said, dropping the bag and crouching into a defensive posture. "Pacifica, lower that!"

"I'm just holding it! I wasn't going to _hit_ you!" Pacifica protested. But she lowered it. "Look, this is a Gravity Falls thing, so it makes zero sense, OK? I don't know where to start. I'm sure Dipper told you about that ghost that haunted Northwest Mansion and turned him into wood—"

Breathing easier, Wendy said, "Whoo, yeah, he told me. Me and my gang missed all that, lucky for us. except for Tambry, but she got there after the ghost had left. What about it?"

"Well, Dipper banished the ghost—"

"No, he didn't," Wendy said. "He told me. _You_ did. You disobeyed your parents and did something brave and good, and _that_ banished him."

"Yeah, whatever, only he's _not_ banished," Pacifica said, blushing a little. "He showed up in my bedroom last night and told me to find this and give it to you."

"To me?" Wendy asked, blinking.

"He's related to you, he says. I think this is your inheritance or something. I don't know. He left it behind in the mansion, and for some reason I took it when we moved out. It's yours now. Here, just take it."

Wendy reached out and closed her hand around the sturdy ash handle. "This," she said, "is really something. Yeah, I'm pretty sure the ghost was Archibald Corduroy, and he was either my great-great grandpa or my great-great uncle or some biz. But he was, like, a ghost, and this is real!"

" _Part_ real," Pacifica said. "He told me it's been in the real world and in the ghost world, and it belongs to both now. He seemed to think you'd need it. There's some ghost rule that he can't pick it up any longer, so I'm delivering it for him."

"Huh. He must think I'll need it, then. Now, _that_ makes me nervous. But I'll accept it. That was really nice of you, Pacifica. Thank you."

"It's OK," she said. She bit her bottom lip. "Wendy? Look, I want to say this, too. I'm sorry I was such a baby when I tried to steal Dipper away from you. It's just—I was so lonely and—he's—he seemed to like me a little that time with the ghost, and then again when that weird thing stole Mabel's face and we had to—anyway. Dipper's a good guy, you know?"

"I know he is," Wendy said with a smile. "As much as anybody does, I know that Dipper's a good guy."

Pacifica took a long, deep breath. "You—you make him happy, OK?"

Wendy nodded and said, "Try my best, girl. Hey, you be happy, too."

Pacifica gave her a surprisingly shy smile. "I'm gonna try. Try my best, too. Well—I have to go."

"Paz?"

She stopped, half-turned, and looked at the redhead. "What?"

"We're friends."

Though tears ran from Pacifica's eyes, she smiled. "Yeah. Thanks, Wen. I so need friends."

""We all do," Wendy said.

And the redhead hugged the blonde, and both of them leaked a few tears, and then Pacifica said goodbye, backed her red convertible out of the driveway, and drove off. Wendy tossed her gym bag into the front passenger seat of her Dodge Dart.

Then she took a few practice swings.

The blade seemed keen enough to cut the morning air into silver shreds.

It made a wicked hiss.

"Hey, thanks, Archibald," Wendy said to whoever or whatever might be listening. "I needed a good axe. This one—this one's as good as an axe can possibly get."

She held it up and admired it. Heavy, but beautifully balanced. A blue gleam curved along the cutting edge. It looked as if it could cut even _before_ the steel bit into whatever. Wood. Flesh and bone, even.

"Love the gift, man. But I guess," Wendy said, "since Paz made it sound so urgent, this means I'm gonna have to use it pretty soon. If you're here, great-great whatever, you come and help me know when, OK? It'd be a favor, one Corduroy to another. Even if I can't see or hear you, just let me know, OK?"

A mysterious gust of wind swept through the front yard. It picked up a few leaves that had been beaten off the trees in the heavy rains and had since dried. They whirled in a sideways eddy, like a whirlwind lying on its side, all across the yard.

Wendy laughed. "I get what you're tellin' me, Archibald. We're not just Corduroys. We're _flippin'_ Corduroys!"

Feeling incredibly pumped and eager for—anything that was coming, she stowed the axe in the trunk of her car and then headed for the Shack to meet Dipper for their morning run.

Smiling, she muttered to herself, "OK, so I'm a high-school graduate, I'm in love, I'm a respectable member of the work force, and I'm even a college girl. So what? Who says a young woman like me can't also be a badass?"

And in the passenger seat next to her, invisibly, a ghost raised his fist into the air and inaudibly, he cheered, "Nobody! Now go, girl! Go! Go, you Corduroy, you!"


	6. Chapter 6

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 13, 2016)**

* * *

 **6: Tease Him a Lot**

That Monday morning Wendy and Dipper did their run into town and back. They slowed as they began the last, long uphill pull to the Shack. As they segued from an easy jog to a power-walk, Wendy peered off to the right—looking down the new, recently-paved driveway to the site where her dad had built Stanford's place—and asked, "Are they workin' on Dr. P's house?"

"Any cars there?"

"Can't see. Dad designed the drives to weave in a curve through the pines, so the house is pretty well hidden. But I thought Mabes would start decorating for the party this morning."

"Maybe she is, by now," Dipper said. "She's having Soos and Melody help with the work, and I think Grenda and Candy are coming over later. She wanted to get things mostly done today, since the Shack's closed."

They passed the second driveway, to Stan's house. "Yeah, and does Mabel need us?"

"I don't think so," Dipper said. "She didn't ask me to come down, anyway. I think she wants us to stand by in case Ford gets a wild idea to come over to his house today—even though there's not much chance of that. He's going to be out of town for five or six hours, over at the campus of his paranormal institute. It's supposed to open at the beginning of September."

"He get his hundred grad students?"

"Up to about 110, he told me yesterday when I talked to him."

They walked together up the Shack driveway. "What did he say about the Bill statue?" Wendy asked.

"It bothers him. He's going to study it. He came out and took a scraping and says it does look like a little patina of gold, but I haven't heard if he ran any chemical tests. I don't think Bill's applying the gold or whatever it is, though. I mean, if he was, the tiny little chip of him inside me should have reacted in one way or another when we saw the bugs and all. I didn't feel anything." After a pause, he added, "May not mean much, though. He stays sort of below the radar lately. I haven't had any real dreams about him, even."

As they approached her parked car, Wendy said, "Hey, come with me. I want to show you something." She took out her key and unlocked the trunk. "Check it out."

"An axe?" Dipper asked.

"The Corduroy axe," Wendy said. "You've seen this before. Look at it closely."

Dipper did. "It—seems to be humming a little," he said. "What causes that?"

"I think it's happy 'cause I'm holding it," Wendy said, turning it to give him a good close look. Recognize it now?"

"It's . . . an axe," Dipper said. "Not the one the wax figures used to chop off Wax Stan's head, though. It looks sort of old."

"Real old, Dipper," Wendy said. "This is the axe that the ghost had when it haunted the Northwest Mansion."

Dipper took an involuntary step backward. "No way!"

"Yep," she said.

"But—you've already got an axe," Dipper said. "Your special one that has the silver edge—"

"Still got that one. Hey, a lumberjack uses different tools for different jobs. Let me grab my bag and let's go inside. I'll show you something special."

Abuelita was up and about, feeding the Ramirez kids their breakfast. Dipper and Wendy said hi to her and then Wendy led Dipper upstairs and into the bathroom. She shut the door and turned off the lights. "See it?"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "It's sort of glowing. Did the ghost give this to you, or-?"

"Pacifica did."

"Pacifica?" Dipper blinked. "How did she get—oh, wait. When she banished the ghost—the axe fell to the floor, didn't it? I didn't see that part, I was too busy turning human again after being wood. But I do kind of have a memory of how it ripped up the floor when the ghost dragged it behind him. Uh, so after the ghost left, Pacifica—collected it?"

"Picked it up and later took it with her when the Northwests moved to their new house. It got stuck away somewhere and then last night Archibald visited her and told her to get it and bring it to me." She switched on the light. "'Cause he kind of said I'd need it."

"This just keeps getting worse," Dipper said.

"Not necessarily. Want to hold it?" she held out the axe.

Dipper gripped its handle. "Whoa, way heavy!"

"Feel it throbbing?"

He concentrated. "Um . . . no."

Wendy reached out and took hold of the handle, gripping it between Dipper's hands. Immediately the wood began to vibrate and the head hummed. "Now?"

"Yeah! How are you doing that?"

Wendy took the axe back. "I'm not. It just happens. Far as I can understand from what Paz told me, this started out as Archibald's axe. When he died, somehow he kept possession of it in the afterworld or whatever. It was sort of a ghost axe—this sounds so dumb."

"No, there have been cases of ghosts apparently transporting physical objects—what's the matter?"

Wendy had giggled. "Nothing, man, it's just funny when you suddenly slip into Stanford mode. Anyways, this axe is part real and part—ghost axe, I guess. That makes it special. Maybe makes it the weapon we'll need to deal with whatever's coming our way. I guess I'll have to start packing again—if this one fits my scabbard. My hair's still not long enough to hide it, though, so I'll have to wear it under my blazer. I hope it won't show."

"Have you tried it?"

"Nope. But I did bring my scabbard kit over. Let's shower and then I'll get the stuff out of the car and see."

They took separate showers—aside from their vow, Abuelita noticed everything and was fairly easy to shock—and then, despite not having to work on their off day, Wendy got the scabbard from her car, slung it around her shoulders (the straps fit like a backpack's) and then pulled on her official green Mystery Shack blazer. She went into the downstairs bathroom to look in the big mirror and came out tugging on the jacket, arranging it.

"Hey, Dip, do you think I'm showing?" she asked, walking into the gift shop.

Where Mabel, who had just that second come in, looked at her with enormous eyes. She hugged Dipper, who looked flummoxed, and yelled, "Yay! I'm going to be an aunt!"

"Whoa!" Wendy said, laughing. "Hold on there! C'mon, Mabes, you guys have been back in Gravity Falls for a _week_! I mean, Dipper may be a fast worker, but he's not _that_ fast!"

"Guys, please," Dipper pleaded. "Mabel, she's talking about her axe!"

Wendy turned around. "Is it hidden?"

"Aw," Mabel said. "Let me take a look at it. Yeah, I can kinda see a little wrinkle at your spine, but it's pretty much hidden. Why are you even carrying your axe? You don't do that unless there's some danger."

"Haven't you been paying attention?" Dipper asked. "There's all kinds of omens that something is brewing. And I think it may be because you talked Billy Sheaffer into coming up with Mom and Dad."

"They'll be here tomorrow afternoon!" Mabel said. "They're gonna stay with the McGuckets! He's gonna have the room I use!"

"But remember, Billy's the reincarnation of Bill Cipher—probably—and—"

"Dip!" Mabel said. "You worry too much! He's a little kid. What's the worst that could happen?"

"End of the world," Dipper muttered.

"Now," Mabel said, completely ignoring that, "I came back because I need glitter. Pounds of glitter! When does the glitter store open?"

"There's not one," Wendy said. "Copier store has it, and I think they open at nine. Out at the mall there's Art Zen Crafts, but it opens at ten."

"Then I've got a little time," Mabel said. "I've got cut-outs to cut out! Later!"

They heard her clump upstairs to the attic, where she still stowed most of her art supplies. "She's not even worried," Dipper said.

Wendy was squirming, raising first one shoulder, than the other. "You worry enough for the two of you," she said. "Ugh. Hey, Dip, this is riding funny. Come here and reach around and see if you can't straighten up the shaft."

He came to her, and she held her arms out straight. "Uh, what do I do now?" he asked.

"Reach under my jacket, with both hands, find the axe handle, and move it until it's hanging slanted a little, from your left to your right. Go ahead."

He reached inside her jacket and around her back—

"Gotcha!" She grabbed him and held him tight against her. And she thought to him, _It's a trap!_

— _Come on, Wendy! I mean, this is nice, but—what a time to tease me._

 _This isn't a tease. Whatever happens, you and me will meet it head-on together. You, me, and Mabel—nothing we can't handle, man._

— _I hope you're right._

* * *

In his office, so new that it still smelled of paint, Ford sat at his desk and looked across at Fiddleford, who hardly looked insane at all, an academic now with a neatly trimmed gray beard, normal spectacles, and wearing a pristine white lab jacket. "So," Fiddleford was saying, "you reckon this boy might, what? Transmogrify into an insane yellow triangle?"

"I don't know what I expect," Ford admitted. "But I'm worried. That residue I scraped from the Cipher effigy—"

"Real finely powdered gold," Fiddleford confirmed. "The binding medium was organic, though. A gluey protein, don't rightly know what it is. The biology man will run a DNA analysis, see what turns up. But that'll take days."

"Gold," Ford murmured. "He turned me into gold, Fiddleford."

"Yeah, I recollect," Fiddleford said. "That demon just don't respect the laws of nature."

"He doesn't even recognize them." Ford got up restlessly and turned to gaze out the window. His office was on the main floor of a former school building, now refurbished and renovated and ready to house the classroom and office space of the graduate-level institute for paranormal research that he headed.

The broad lawn was green with summer. The hills beyond rose into mountains—the same mountains that surrounded Gravity Falls, not quite twenty miles distant. Two new structures flanked the classroom building, long two-storied dormitories, each with room for seventy students, double occupancy.

Though Ford was well-off—his patents and the ones he shared with Fiddleford had continued to pay off while he was missing for thirty years, and Stanley hadn't had access to the funds, not knowing about them—he couldn't have afforded all this. The Agency, a super-secret organization dedicated to tracking down paranormal intrusions in the world and, if necessary, eliminating them, had paid for it all, in exchange for Ford's agreeing to head it.

Sometimes he wondered if his old mentor at Backuspmore, the Professor, had done him a favor in nominating him for the position. The Professor was now formally retired, enjoying life back East, though he remained available as a consultant.

He'd assured Ford the job was not onerous. And it wasn't. Every morning Ford had a one-hour situation report conducted by internet hook-up. If anything unusual happened anywhere in the world, he received an instant text message.

But intrusions from other realities and dimensions happened rarely, minor ones maybe two or three times a year, major ones not more than once a decade. So far there had been no major problems on his watch. The Mothman had briefly returned to West Virginia, but once again had eluded capture. A Lizard Man had been spotted in South Carolina, but turned out to be a confused creature from some place called Mewni, temporarily hurled to Earth by a magic spell. That situation resolved itself when the spell wore off and the bipedal lizard creature zapped off, presumably home, and if not home, at least out of the Agency's hair.

The Exspots—that was Agency jargon for the loci where paranormal activity was always higher than elsewhere—had been very moderately active. Gravity Falls, of course, always had something going on. Double Peaks, up in Washington State, simmered along. San Jose, California, ticked on the meter now and again. Two dozen similar locations in North and South America hummed along, not at an alarming level.

Yet Ford had not relaxed since taking over the Agency position in January.

Anything could happen. Anytime.

He remembered consulting the Oracle about Bill. She had despised Cipher. However, she had also hinted that a greater power, the Axolotl, had decided against Cipher's termination. The Axolotl thought Bill—the worst of all the demonic forces that Ford had ever encountered—might reform if given a last chance.

Ford had never been that optimistic.

He turned around. Fiddleford still sat in his chair. That was a great thing about McGucket. He was a good friend who knew when to talk and when to remain quiet. And he never took Ford's anxieties or explosions of frustration personally. "What do you think?" Ford asked him. "When this Sheaffer kid comes up from California, should I even meet him?"

"What harm could it do?" Fiddleford asked.

"Well—Fiddleford, he and I were adversaries. Yet at one time I trusted him. I let him possess my mind! What if the sight of me awakens his memory? What if he reverts to being Bill Cipher? I don't know if I could stand another combat with him."

"He's ten years old," Fiddleford pointed out. "And in a human body."

"But the Cipher effigy is being made ready for—something. Maybe we could dynamite it."

"Maybe we could," Fiddleford agreed. "But we don't know. You asked if you should meet this here Billy kid. I'd say yes. Like I told you, he's ten right now. If he runs into you in five years, in ten, you'll be weaker and he'll be stronger."

"You don't know what he's like—"

Fiddleford slapped the desktop hard, startling Ford. "Let me tell you somethin'," Fiddleford said. "I got pulled through our Portal! I seen the Nightmare Realm up close and personal! I seen the horrible form of Bill Cipher when he wasn't no dad-burn little nacho chip, but a durned eldritch horror! I lost my fuckin' mind, Ford—excuse the language. I do know what might happen. But I also know that if it happens, it better come quick. Now, me and the rest of the Zodiac crew, we oughta be on alert. I wouldn't tell 'em what the problem is—just to be ready if you call for 'em. But, Ford—remember, somebody pretty blamed smart, smarter'n you and me put together by a long sight, wants Billy to have a last chance. I reckon the least we can do is to give it to him—and be ready with our quantum destabilizers and disrupters if we need 'em!"

"I never once heard you swear like that," Ford said.

"Well, I'm sorry. But I been crazy once, and it was horrible."

"And you still want to give the kid a chance."

"Ford—I reckon that at his worst, Cipher was more crazier than I was."

"I agree."

Fiddleford's voice quivered: "An' iffen bein' crazy hurt me so deep—think of what it musta done to him."

Ford took in a long breath. "Fiddleford, you're a better man than I am. It goes against my instincts, but—very well. We'll deal with Billy Sheaffer when he gets here. Maybe he won't remember anything. But if he does—"

"I'll make sure all the quantum weapons are powerized."

"Look out for yourself, old friend."

"Double that back to you, Ford."


	7. Chapter 7

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 14, 2016)**

* * *

 **7: Got Him on the Spot**

Perhaps Dipper should have seen it coming. But then you can't think of everything, can you, unless you're the Axolotl. Then you probably can't _help_ thinking of everything.

Dipper was not the Axolotl, so some possibilities escaped him. And when his parents arrived late that afternoon—

Whoa, that's getting ahead of the story. Pause. Rewind.

* * *

A cold front pushed into Gravity Falls on Monday night, dropping the low down to 37. Tuesday happened to be a rest-and-recoup day for Dipper and Wendy's running routine, and when Mabel went out to feed her pigs their breakfast and immediately came back inside and added a second sweater, he was glad that he didn't have to run.

At about eight, Wendy came in wearing her gray windbreaker. "Nippy!" she said. "You had breakfast yet?"

"Waiting for you," Dipper said, taking her jacket and hanging it on the coat tree.

"Nice of you," Wendy said, giving him a friendly kiss, "but I had breakfast with the Corduroy guys this morning. But I'll have a cup of coffee and keep you company."

He'd been thinking cereal, but the chill in the air—Wendy's nose was cold!—made him change his mind, and he made oatmeal instead, just for a hot breakfast. However, he didn't just dump the oatmeal into boiling water. He had learned tastier ways.

Instead, he measured the oatmeal into a deep pot, added cold—yes, cold—water and brought that to a boil, then reduced the heat to a simmer. He kept stirring it. And to the bubbling oatmeal, he added, in this order, chopped walnuts, raisins, some brown sugar, some cinnamon, a nice portion of preserved apples (courtesy of Wendy's aunt, who had sent them to the Ramirezes as a gift), and just a touch of cloves.

"Smells good," Wendy observed from the table as Dipper added a couple of slices of home-made sourdough bread to the toaster.

"I made extra," Dipper said.

"Tempting, but I'll pass," Wendy said. "Coffee's fine for me."

"I don't think we'll have any left over," Dipper said with a grin.

Sure enough, Mabel came running in. "What's that wonderful smell?"

"Just oatmeal," Dipper said, stirring the pot. "It's ready if you want a bowl."

Mabel grabbed a medium-large bowl from the cabinet. "Ha! Is the Pope a bear? Wait, that's not right. Something about the Pope and the woods?"

"Way off," Dipper said, making a shushing gesture. Soos's family was Catholic. "Get a spoon and sit down. No, here, let me have the bowl." He dished up the steaming oatmeal and set a little pitcher of cream on the table. Mabel emptied the whole container on her cereal, and with a sigh, Dipper refilled it—but only about a quarter of the way—and poured that more sensible serving on his own oatmeal.

"Soos is already in his Mr. Mystery get-up," Wendy said. "I saw him outside, gassing up the tram."

"Yeah, they ate earlier," Dipper told her. "Hey, Mabel, one of those slices of toast was mine!"

"Not my fault you didn't put your name on it," Mabel said, taking a big bite out of it.

Wendy got up. "I'll pop another one down for you, Dip."

"One for me, too!" Mabel said with her mouth full. "And do we have any of that cherry zinfandel jam left?"

Wendy opened the fridge. "Little bit. You can scrape the jar."

By the time the toast popped up, Mabel had finished her oatmeal and greedily reached for both of the new slices.

"Nuh-uh!" Dipper said, quickly grabbing one. "That's your third, and this is only my first." He buttered the toast but didn't put any jam on it, which was just as well because Mabel didn't leave any for him to spread on it.

When they'd finished with breakfast and coffee, Wendy said, "OK, Mabes, now you gotta pay for pigging out. You do the breakfast dishes."

"If one of you will dry!" she said.

They both dried, and by nine o'clock, they were ready for the day's work. Dipper's phone chimed to warn him of an incoming text, which he read. "Mom, Dad, and Billy left Piedmont this morning at five-thirty," he said. "That means they'll probably get here between four and five."

"Are they staying with Grunkle Stan?" Mabel asked.

"I think they're planning on staying at the McGuckets'," Dipper said. "That will be better. They can bring Ford and Lorena and Billy over tomorrow for the party."

"What are we gonna show Billy first?" Mabel asked. "I know! My pigs!"

"He'll love that," Wendy said. "But I'm thinkin' maybe we can drive him around some. Show him the overlooks and the falls and all—but not so much here right around the Shack."

Mabel groaned. "But the Mystery Shack is the best part!"

"Unless," Dipper said, "he suddenly remembers he was Bill Cipher."

Mabel rolled her eyes and moved her fingers and thumb as if she were making a sock puppet talk. "Oh, blah-de blah blah, Brobro. Heh! That's fun to say. Blah de blah de Brobro blah, blah de—"

"Seriously," Dipper said. "I don't know what might happen if all of a sudden the Bill Cipher we knew, you know, took over Billy's body."

"Hey, come on," Mabel said. "Do you ever remember when Bill Cipher took over _your_ body?"

"I remember being disembodied," Dipper said. "Basically a ghost. It's no fun."

"Wouldn't be—for _you_ , Broseph," Mabel said. "Now, if it was Dippy Fresh, he'd go hang out in the girls' shower room at the high school or something exciting!"

"I hate Dippy Fresh," Dipper reminded her. "And what would you think about me if I played some mean trick like that?"

"That you were normal. For a change," Mabel said. "Do you ever dream about Bill Cipher and the puppet thing?"

"No," Dipper said. "I do dream now and then about being back in Mabel Land. And Dippy Fresh comes up and criticizes me because of the way I wear my hat."

"What's wrong with the way you wear it?" Wendy asked. "He had one just like it, as I remember."

"Yeah, but he wore it back to front," Dipper said. "That's in my dream. Dippy comes up and grabs my trucker's cap and spins it around and says, "Oh, no, bro, your cap's on backwards!"

"What do you do?" Mabel asked, grinning.

"I say 'Your _head's_ on backwards.' And then I grab him by the ears and spin his head so hard and fast that his neck snaps and he dies."

"Uh—" Mabel said, blinking. "Oh, I see. Huh. You must really not like him very much."

"Read my lips," Dipper said. Just thinking about Dippy Fresh, the substitute twin brother that Mabel had magically conjured up in Mabel Land, got his temperature and his back up. The conversation might have taken an unpleasant turn, but then a bus pulled into the lot, thirty tourists poured out, and the work day started.

By the time Teek showed up, it was clear the lunch crowd would be big, too. It had turned out to be beautiful, coolish day—temperature at noon only 68, but the sky clear and blue, the woodpeckers in great form, and the other birds chattering, peeping, and whistling. Abuelita took the snack-bar register, and Mabel took the second gift-shop register. Things hummed along, not slowing down until after two that afternoon, when they finally were able to take a staggered lunch break.

As frequently happened, Teek cooked for them—that kept waste to a minimum, since he had become an excellent judge of just how much to take from the fridge for any given crowd. Mabel spelled Dipper at the register—by then the morning crowd had thinned, and one register was enough. Dipper had a burger, then took Wendy's place on the floor so she could grab lunch, then Dipper took a turn as Mr. Mystery, Jr., driving the tram down the Mystery Trail while Soos ate, and so they got through the day. And Mabel even helped Teek clean up the grill after the snack bar had closed, so maybe things were looking brighter for the two of them, too.

All in all, Dipper didn't have much time to anticipate what might happen later.

Teek had already gone home when Mabel suddenly yelled, "They're here!"

Dipper looked out the window. His mom's black RAV4 had rolled into the parking lot. He checked the time: 4:22, so his prediction had been pretty much on the money.

He saw Mabel run out across the lawn, waving. His dad parked the compact SUV, Mabel jerked the back door open, and Billy Sheaffer, in a yellow sweater—one she'd knitted for him the winter before—got out, looking around.

Dad and Mom crossed the lawn, heading for the gift-shop door.

Mabel, talking a mile a minute, followed them, with Billy at her side.

And just as he got close to the porch—

Billy fell backward hard, as if smacked across the forehead with a baseball bat. Dipper felt a chill.

Dad and Mom didn't seem to notice, but came in smiling. Soos greeted them and ushered them into the parlor. Dipper signaled Wendy and then ran outside.

"What's wrong with him?" Mabel asked. Billy was sitting on the lawn, looking a little dazed.

"Unicorns," Dipper said.

"What do you—" Mabel's eyes got very round. "Oh. The hair?"

"What hit me?" Billy asked. In many ways, he was just a kid, but Dipper had to give him credit—he wasn't crying.

"It's an anomaly," he said. "There are some people who can't stand to enter the Shack. Don't worry about it. Hey, I'll, uh, show you around a little out here. Mabel, go tell Wendy to come and meet Billy."

"Uh—sure," Mabel said, sounding oddly uncertain.

Billy got up, Dipper dusted him off, and then he said, "Look at me. OK, no bruises. What did it feel like?"

Billy frowned. "Sort of like I walked into a glass door. I did that one time in a mall. But more, uh, bouncy, I guess?"

"That's the anomaly," Dipper said. "Hey, here comes Soos on the tram. Would you like a tour of the Mystery Trail? I can take you in, uh, the golf cart."

"OK," Billy said. "We should tell your folks—"

"Hi," Wendy said. "You OK, little guy?"

"I think so, Red," Billy said.

Wendy darted a glance at Dipper and then touched the back of his neck. _How much does he know, Dip?_

— _So far, not much. I think the Red thing is just a reflex._

 _What are you gonna do?_

— _Keep him busy out here until Mom and Dad are ready to go. Listen, go call Ford. We protected the McGucket house, too—and Stan's and Ford's. Ford knows about Billy—get him to dig up one of the moonstones to break the field, at least at McGucket's. And I guess Mabel and I will have to do the same for Stan's and Ford's houses, too—we'll just have to watch Billy closely._

"What's the matter?" Billy asked.

"Nothing, just making sure you're OK," Dipper said. "Wendy has the keys to the golf cart. Wendy, I'm going to show Billy the Mystery Trail, if that's OK."

"Yeah, business isn't heavy right now. Just the tourists getting off the tram. Here you go, Dipper. Be careful, OK?"

"You know what a cautious fellow I am," Dipper said.

* * *

As they started off, Billy told him, "I never rode in a golf cart before! Electric?"

"Yep," Dipper said. "You can go pretty far, but not so fast."

"Oh, hey," Billy said, "your mom and dad got a box of two dozen copies of your new book yesterday. They gave me one. Will you sign it?"

"Oh, sure," Dipper said.

"They brought up, I think, ten so if you want to give them out as presents—but maybe it was a surprise." His expression became anxious and worried. "If it was supposed to be, can you act surprised?"

"I think I can manage it," Dipper said. "Now, if you look to your right, that's the famous Bottomless Pit. There are many pits in this great land of ours, but none more bottomless than the Bottomless Pit." He stopped the golf cart and they walked over to the low wall around the Pit. You could feel a breeze blowing into the pit and hear the rush of air—and you could see far down until darkness swallowed everything up.

"Whoa!" Billy said.

Dipper picked up a tennis-ball-sized rock. "Toss this in."

Billy did, and they waited a long time, but of course they didn't hear it hit. Because it didn't hit and would never hit. "Wow," Billy said.

Then they got back into the golf cart. "Now, that little building on the left, that's the Outhouse of Mystery. It's an outdoor bathroom."

"It looks like the one in that movie about the troll," Billy said.

"Yeah, it kinda does. Back when the Shack was built—maybe even before that—this was the only place to use the bathroom. No water, just a hole in the ground under it. And you wouldn't believe the smell."

"Hah!"

Dipper went on: "But the weirdest thing is if you just go in and close the door, sometimes—not all the time—two hours go by, even if you just shut the door and open it. Nobody knows why. And there's always a chance that if you close the door and turn around counterclockwise three times, you'll wind up in the Crawl Space."

Billy looked interested. "What's that?"

"It's a realm where paranormal creatures have a kind of flea market. Or that's the story."

Actually, though part of what Dipper said was true, a good deal wasn't. You couldn't get to the Crawl Space that way. That was ridiculous.

In addition to turning three times counterclockwise, you also had to do it hopping on one foot.

On they went, past the bonfire glade, past the Talking Rock (a stone with ancient Native American glyphs on them, most of which Stan had put there) and the spot where the Gnomes sometimes made an appearance, all the way out to the Lonely Man (another, more authentic standing stone from pre-Columbian times) and Moon Trap Pond and then back.

Dipper's phone rang—Mabel's ring tone—as they were passing the bonfire glade again. "Dipper? Mom and Dad are ready to go."

"Good timing," he said. "We're just coming up in the golf cart."

"I need to, uh—" Billy said.

Dipper stopped at the Outhouse of Mystery. "You can go in here," he said. "Just don't close the door all the way. I'll stand guard."

"Thanks!"

He came out after a minute. "OK?" Dipper asked.

"Yeah, it was something," Billy told him. "But you were right, it really stinks!"

When they got to the parking lot, Dipper told Mabel to let Billy use her hand sanitizer—her sweater held that among many, many other necessities—and then she said she'd ride over to the McGuckets' with their parents and Billy. "It'll be OK," she said. "Grunkle Ford is expecting us."

Mom hugged Dipper, Dad said, "I can see Soos keeps you guys busy in the summers. I'm glad you're getting some work experience!"

"Maybe tomorrow we'll have time to show Billy through the Shack," Dipper said. "We'll see. I'll call you guys with plans for the party and all."

"Oh wait," Mom said. She opened the car door, took out a book, and handed it to Dipper. "Congratulations! There's a letter from your editor in an envelope inside there, too. We have more, but we'll have to unpack them."

"Great!" Dipper said. "It's due in the stores next week, This is a great surprise! Thanks for bringing it!"

Back in the Shack, things had settled. It was a little past five PM, and the Shack would close at six. "Oh, man," Dipper said. "The unicorn field keeps him out. I have to call Ford—"

"Already talked to him," Wendy said. "He says to remove the moonstone nearest the gift-shop door. Keep it in a safe place, 'cause we'll need to replant it after Billy leaves. But that'll temporarily take down the barrier. Only, Ford says, we have to do one thing—watch Billy like a hawk, every minute he's inside. What's that?"

Dipper handed her the book: _It Lurked in the Lake, A Tripper and Alexa Palms Adventure,_ by Stan Mason. The cover showed the cartoony-looking Palms twins posing for a lakeside photo being taken by a pear-shaped guy in a baseball cap and green tee shirt—Hoss Enriquez, the handyman/caretaker for a tourist-trap called Mysterious Manor in the paranormal town of Granite Rapids. In the story, the tourist spot was the property of the twins' Grunkle Manny.

On the jacket, the two lifejacket-wearing twins smiled and held up bunny-ear fingers over each other's head as they posed. Neither realized that, coming out of the water behind them, was a glowery-eyed, scaly, slimy water monster, head and neck like those of an oozy dragon—the Gobblywhonker.

"Hoss looks like Soos," Wendy said, chuckling. "He'll get a kick out of that!"

Dipper had opened the envelope that had been inside the book. He whistled.

"What?" Wendy asked.

Dipper read his editor's note aloud:

* * *

 _Dear Dipper,_

 _We're so pleased with how the book turned out! You got a five-star review in_ Best Books for School Libraries, _which is bound to goose sales, and_ PW _says "Stan Mason is like a Stephen King for young teens, but with a huge helping of wacky humor to make the terror even more startling. Recommended!" I'll be sending you a big envelope with about a dozen reviews in them and guess what? They're all good-to-raves._

 _Pre-orders are about 50% over_ Bride of the Zombie's, _and we're expecting paperback sales of that book to be strong, too. And I'll let Bea tell you about some other exciting news. Congratulations, and if this one doesn't top the best-seller list, I'll jump down a Gobblywhonker's throat myself!_

 _Best,_

 _Jan_

* * *

"Well, that's great news!" Wendy said. "Proud of you, Dipper. Enjoy your success!"

"I hope," he said, "I'll get to do that. After what happened to Billy today—I'm not so sure."

"About what?"

He said, "About living to enjoy it." And he gave her a smile.

Except it wasn't a particularly happy-looking one.


	8. Chapter 8

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 14, 2016)**

* * *

 **8: Always Could Spot a Friend**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Tuesday, 9:15 PM: Billy Sheaffer is staying in the same room Mabel uses when we're guests at the McGuckets'. Fiddleford's on the alert. Without Billy's knowing it, Fiddleford had him scanned as they all ate dinner—on the excuse that Billy was a little short for the table, Fiddleford brought in the robot he calls Chair Man Miaow—which is an ornate chair, but with tons of invisibly built-in tech and weapons—for him to sit in. The seat of the chair had been adjusted for his height._

 _But while they ate, Fiddleford's weirdness scanners (he developed the ones that Grunkle Ford uses still) gave Billy a thorough examination._

 _The result: "Unclassified weirdness." But Billy's not aware of it. I don't know how the scanners can tell that, but Ford studied the readouts and gave me a summary over the phone a few minutes ago: "The boy is human as far as physiology and biology go—aging at a normal rate, in good health, and so on—but his mind is certainly corrupted by Bill Cipher. What I think is happening, and I could be wrong, is that Cipher's consciousness is almost completely dormant. As Billy grows up, and especially as he goes through puberty, Bill's influence will grow, and finally when Billy becomes a young adult, Bill will be dominant. Essentially, Billy Sheaffer will become Bill Cipher in mind—not body, but in his thinking. That will be catastrophic."_

 _I'm still trying to understand why the Axolotl gave Bill a second chance when Grunkle Stan was wiping him out of the Mindscape—which would have finished him for good if Bill hadn't invoked the name of the Axolotl and asked for a chance to return. I said to Grunkle Ford, "If what the Oracle says is true, then Bill's second chance depends on his becoming better—creative, not destructive, controlled, not chaotic."_

" _True," Grunkle Ford said to me. "But I question whether he's even capable of making that change. What if this is all some long game of Cipher's? You already see how Cipher's nudging the boy to do his bidding—why would he even want to come to Gravity Falls, except Cipher's still planning on our destruction?"_

" _Uh," I said, "Mabel told him all these exciting stories about Gravity Falls. Billy has an imagination, like every kid. Maybe stronger than most. I think maybe he just wanted to see if Mabel's stories were true. You know, unicorns, Gnomes, guys marrying woodpeckers, all the craziness."_

" _I can see how that would be tempting," Ford agreed. "Well—it's true that when we all worked together, and with the aid of Stanley's willingness to sacrifice his own mind, we defeated Cipher. Now we must, at the very least, exercise great vigilance to make sure Billy isn't planning to manifest as Cipher. And as far as his reformation goes—seriously, Mason, is it likely that a being trillions of years old would change his ways?"_

" _Maybe," I said. "Bill had never faced death before. He could have been terrified of it."_

" _Death," Ford said. "Or perhaps judgment. To sleep, perchance to dream, you know." I heard him sigh. "For the time being, we must watch Billy every minute. I understand your parents are only visiting until Thursday—"_

" _They're leaving early Thursday morning," I said. "That means we just have to get through tomorrow."_

" _Good. Although in my judgment, it was possible to celebrate Stanley's and my birthday without bringing in dubious characters from other dimensions. Still, Alex and Wanda are fairly oblivious to just how strange things can be around here. Well, one thing gives me hope."_

" _I know," I said. "That Mabel's kindness and my guidance can keep Billy away from—uh, dreams of power."_

 _There was a long pause, and I asked if he was still there. "Oh, yes," he said. "Well—I'm sorry, Mason, I don't mean to belittle your contribution or Mabel's, but, no, I was thinking the very fact that Bill was able to enter the Valley, even concealed within the mind of the boy, is a hopeful point. If you recall, when Bill took physical form, neither he nor his minions could pass the weirdness barrier that contained Weirdmageddon to the valley. It's even possible he now may be trapped here—and if he is, then when he's in his weak, human form, we should be able to deal with him."_

 _I felt a little sick. "Grunkle Ford, he came through the barrier to get here."_

" _It may be permeable in only one direction. You can check in any time, but then you can never leave."_

" _But—he'll be in the car—if Mom and Dad and the car can go through the barrier to leave Gravity Falls, but he can't—"_

" _The pressure would kill him," Ford said. "I'm sorry, Mason, I know how cold and heartless this makes me sound, but remember—Bill betrayed me terribly. For a time, he even controlled me, overrode my own mind, and took over my body. And when I realized what his goal was in teaching me to construct the Portal, he laughed at me! If I sound cranky and bitter, it's because I am."_

" _Hold on," I said. "I can come and go freely. But Bill put a little of himself inside me that time when the Horroracle left me dying."_

" _True, but it was a minuscule fragment of Cipher—and made of Earthly elements, not those of his own dimension," Ford said. "Hmm. Now that I think about it, Billy probably can come and go for the same reasons—his body is fully human. It's only his psyche that is alien. I wonder if leaving the Falls will erase that. Well, at any rate, our best hope at containing the threat is constant vigilance. Someone must be with Billy every moment until he leaves Gravity Falls."_

 _As soon as we got off the phone, I told Mabel. "You, me, and Wendy," I said. "We're the guardians. We've got to keep track of Billy and make sure he doesn't get—into trouble. One of us has to be there with him every second of tomorrow."_

" _Even if he needs a potty break?" she asked._

" _Tell me, and I'll make up an excuse to go with him," I said. That was going to be awkward. But better awkward than becoming an interdimensional demon's puppet for all eternity._

* * *

That night Dipper dreamed of Bill—not Billy, the human kid, but Bill Cipher, the cheerfully insane, power-mad, conscienceless demon.

"Are you really here?" Dipper asked. "Or is this a regular dream?"

"Who knows, Pine Tree?" Cipher asked. He was spinning slowly in the air, but oddly, his eye and top hat moved, so that they were always rising to the top of the next angle. "Yeah, it's a neat trick," he said, answering Dipper's thoughts rather than his words. "I can only do this 'cause I'm equilateral. All sides are equal to me, that means. Shooting Star once called me isosceles. Do you know how much that hurt me?"

"How much?"

"Not at all! Ah-ha-ha-ha! Laugh it up, kid, these are the jokes. OK, regular dream or ice dream with nuts, this is _your_ Mindscape, Pine Tree. Just look around!"

They floated in a grotesque yet familiar landscape. They were upstairs in the Shack, but next door—visible through the triangular window in the attic bedroom—was Dipper's home in Piedmont. And because the walls of the attic room were transparent, he could also see the Corduroy house just next door on the other side. Though it was opaque, somehow he could see Wendy sleeping in her own bed, hugging a pillow.

"Want me to make Red dream of you?" Bill asked. "Then you could talk. Or do those crazy Earth mating rituals you meat bags have! I'd love to watch you two doing that. Sounds perverted? That's 'cause I'm a little bent! Get it? Bent, 'cause—"

"Of your angles," Dipper said. "Lame."

"What can I say? Only nine little molecules don't stack up to much. Billy Sheaffer's asleep, too. That's why I can visit you. The bits of me in you are just a two-way radio, so we can have a heart to heart." He paused. "See what I did there?"

"I think your sense of humor's gone back to being a ten-year-old's," Dipper said.

"Ooh! Burn! Say, you and your Grunkle Stanny have more in common than I first thought! You guys crack me up!"

"Please, Bill," Dipper asked in the dream. "Tell me the truth: Are you plotting to kill us all and take over or something?"

"Plotting? No, kid. Not me. I swear on my mother's grave. I dug it myself, 'cause I killed her, you know. OK, OK, in about fifteen seconds you're gonna wake up scared, so let me tell you something that will help. Don't let Billy make a deal with me! He's a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing. Don't show him which corner is the Earth and which one's the Sky—"

At the word "sky," the ceiling of the attic bedroom vanished, and a bloody red X-shaped rip appeared at the zenith, burning, sucking in all the stars—

"No!"

And Dipper woke himself up. "Gah," he muttered. "I still don't know if it was real or not." He looked at his clock. Past two. With a frustrated sigh, he lay down and tried to sleep again.

In about thirty minutes, he went back into REM sleep—rapid-eye-movement, the level of sleep that's most conducive to dreaming. He had a series of dreams, most of which he couldn't remember the next morning. But the last one—that stuck with him.

This time—no Cipher. He was at the beach.

Which beach he didn't know.

It was a deep, warm night. The land behind shelved gently down, became white sand, and the great world ocean rolled in, the breakers glittering beneath the light of millions of stars before they broke in cascades of phosphorescent foam and murmurs like long-drawn-out sighs. Someone was sitting on the sand, and when he walked, or drifted over—it was a dream, some things weren't clear—he saw it was Wendy.

"Hi," he said.

"Oh, hey, Dip. Cipher told me if I'd wait here, you'd meet me."

"You dreamed about him too?"

"Guess so. Weird, though. He didn't scare me, and he should have."

"Can I sit beside you?"

"Sure, man! Come on, what's the matter?" Her grin was familiar enough to make him feel warm. "Trust issues, huh? I'm me. I'm not, like, a pile of cockroaches or anything. Or a Shapeshifter."

He sat next to her. He was fully aware that their surroundings—the beach, the ocean—were in her Mindscape, not his. For one thing, his had only whites and grays, and this one was in color—mostly violet-black, because it was night without a moon, but the stars glittered in all ranges of the spectrum, and he could see a tangle of interstellar glowing gas spread in a wide belt, vivid purples, greens, and reds.

"And you're not Bill Cipher, pretending to be Wendy?" Dipper asked.

"Don't think so. Feels like me."

"We've got to watch Billy." Dipper recapped his conversation with Mabel.

"We'll try our best," Wendy promised.

"And I think—I'm not sure if it was real or just an illusion, my own imagination, you know—I think that Bill warned me not to let Billy make a deal with him. How do we do that?"

"Dunno, Dip. Just keep a real close eye on him, I guess. Maybe we'd know it if we saw it."

Dipper struggled with the words: "I don't think Billy Sheaffer is evil. Well, not yet. Ford is thinking the world would be better off if—without Billy, I mean. But that's not fair, is it? If the Axolotl gave him a second chance, and we took that chance away, what does that make us?"

"I'm not a philosophy major," Wendy said. "Sorry, man. All I know is, it strikes me as wrong. And as the kind of thing that my Dipper wouldn't do."

"Your Dipper?" Dipper suddenly realized something. "You don't think this is me!"

"Well—I dream of Dipper a lot," Wendy said. "Maybe you're my dream version. Kind of a more aggressive and grown-up Dippy Fresh. Sorry, man, I know that pisses you off!"

Dipper opened his eyes. It had seemed so vivid. Now the clock told him it was nearly six. Where did time go? He got up and dressed and then, hesitantly, he called Wendy. She answered on the first ring. "Morning, Dip. We running today?"

"Come on over when you're ready," he said. He paused. "I dreamed about you."

"Same here. I dreamed about you. We had this real serious conversation by the ocean—"

"—at night," Dipper said. "I know. I think—we had a mind-link again, like when our telepathy was on all the time, touching or not. We talked about—"

"—whether Billy was a threat. And you said Ford sort of thought he should be, you know, put down. Pre-emptively. And you disagreed, and that made me happy."

"We just have to get through today," he told her.

"Yeah. But assuming we do—what about all the days after?"

"Same deal," Dipper said. "We take them one at a time."

"One at a time, man," she agreed. "You, Mabel, and me. Mystery Team."

He chuckled. "That sounds a little, uh, juvenile now."

"So?" Wendy asked. "Put it in your next book."

"I will," he promised. "I will. If we get through today."


	9. Chapter 9

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 15, 2016)**

* * *

 **9: How You Must Have Been**

It took some reorganizing—Wednesday turned out to be a busy day for the Shack—but Soos managed to give Dipper a day off, so he could be Billy's guide. And guard, too, but they left that part unspoken.

Dipper and Wendy skipped their run. "We can make it up by not taking our next day off," Wendy said. "You'd better stay close to him all day long. Even during the party."

She did drop Dipper off at the McGuckets' house that morning. He found that his dad and mom were still in bed at seven, but Fiddleford was awake, as was Mayellen, and they welcomed him in and took him to the dining room, where Billy was already eating. "Hi, Dipper!" he said. "Look at all the food!"

McGucket mechanicontraptions did most of the cooking, though Mayellen had been re-learning skills long disused and now made special meals. The problem with a robot, which of course did not itself eat, was that it had only a dim conception of how much food was enough, and so the mechanicook always made too much, and often a wide variety of too much. That suited Mabel—and it was for her sake that Fiddleford had not yet programmed the machines with a portion-control algorithm—but for those with more conventional appetites, the abundance often led to overeating and/or lots of leftovers.

That morning the spread included eggs Benedict, croissant breakfast sandwiches (cream cheese, bacon, and avocado in the filling), a blueberry, blackberry, and strawberry compote with cubes of Tillamook cheese on the side, a choice of fresh-squeezed juices (orange, grapefruit, cranberry), and coffee, though Fiddleford favored a strong French roast that not only woke you up but also sent you to a slightly different dimension for an hour or two. Billy was halfway through a stack of what looked like blueberry pancakes, with crispy bacon on the side, and a glass of milk.

"Set yourself down!" Fiddleford said, sounding delighted. "Help yourself, Dipper. Whatever you want!"

Well—one of the poached eggs on a bed of spinach and a platform of English muffin, with creamy Hollandaise sauce, he decided. Just one. And orange juice and half a cup of coffee with a lot of milk to cut its bitterness. "Did you sleep OK?" he asked Billy.

"Oh, yeah!" The boy smiled and added in a mock whisper, "No bad dreams!"

"That's great," Dipper said. "I thought this morning I'd show you around the town. Then we'll have lunch somewhere and go back to the Shack."

Billy looked a little apprehensive. "What about the abnombaly?"

"Anomaly," Dipper said. "Usually they go away. We'll be careful, but it'll probably be all right today."

"OK."

"And then there's the you-know-what you-know-where you-know-when fer you-know-who," Fiddleford said. "Did any of that make sense?"

"The party at seven-thirty in Grunkle Ford's house for Ford and Stan," Dipper said. "I got it."

"Good. Sometimes I get my own self as mixed up as a bald-headed bumblebee in a barber shop."

Mr. and Mrs. Pines came down before Dipper and Billy had finished, and they sat down to the astonishing breakfast. "Such a lot of food!" Mrs. Pines said.

"Aw, we recycles what's left over, so there's no waste," Fiddleford said. That was true; when Mayellen had objected to the wasteful nature of the machines' over-enthusiastic cooking, Fiddleford had knocked together a device that disintegrated leftover food into component molecules, stored them, and then when called upon later reintegrated the molecules as whatever the diner wanted, a thick steak, _pâté de fois gras,_ fresh Columbia River pears, or Earl Grey tea, hot—or practically anything else, though for some reason it still couldn't create a drinkable vanilla shake.

It's rumored that a time-traveler from the TPAES stole the plans for this machine and a couple of centuries later sold them to Starfleet, but nobody could ever prove that.

Anyway, Alex and Wanda had reasonable portions of breakfast and said goodbye as Dipper and Billy set off to explore the town. Fiddleford had rented a couple of bikes for them for the day, and they climbed on and whizzed down the driveway, slowing only before turning into the street.

It was still early, without much traffic, and they rode downtown together. Dipper took Billy to Circle Park, where a couple of joggers were making the rounds. Billy played on the swings, climbing bars, and slide—but Dipper excused himself from the latter. "I'm a little too old now for that," he said, but he sat in a swing and watched. They left their bikes near the playground and walked the short distance over to the water tower.

"Gravity Falls," Billy read, looking up and shading his eye.

"There used to be some graffiti up there, too," Dipper told him. "It was either a gigantic explosion or a big muffin. I never could decide which."

"It looks like one of those Martian machines from _War of the Worlds,_ Billy said. "What if it could, like, walk around and shoot a heat ray? _Pew! Pew-pew-pew_!"

Dipper got a mild case of goosebumps. During Weirdmageddon, the water tower _had_ walked around, though mercifully, it had lacked the heat ray. They reclaimed the bikes and rode back through town and then over to the beach. "How deep is it?" Billy asked, pointing to the lake.

"Pretty deep," Dipper said. "I don't know the measurement in feet or anything, but this is an old geologic fissure that filled with water. Those islands out there? They're the tops of submerged mountains. Well, most of them."

One was a bizarre disembodied head, but Billy didn't need to know that.

They skimmed a few rocks and then walked out on the stone jetty where Mermando, Mabel's first kiss, had once leaped over her on his way back to the sea—though Dipper had observed that he'd gone in the wrong direction at first, up the falls instead of downriver. Anyhow, he had finally returned home to the Gulf of Mexico.

From there they had a good view of the falls. "What's their name?" Billy asked.

"Gravity Falls Falls," Dipper said.

"I thought the town was named for the waterfall," Billy said.

"No, other way around. Back in the 1800s, the whole valley was named Gravity Falls by an American president who accidentally fell into it from the cliffs."

"How'd that happen?"

"He was riding a horse, but sitting on it backwards."

"That makes sense," Billy said

 _He's only ten, going on eleven,_ Dipper thought.

They continued their tour—at one point a couple of Gnomes waved to Dipper, and Billy got behind him. "What are those things?" he asked in a panicky voice.

"Just Gnomes," Dipper said. "They're OK."

"They're so little!"

One of them heard him and swaggered over. "Who are you calling little, half-pint?" the Gnome demanded in a squeaky, angry voice.

"Ease off, Mike," Dipper said cheerfully. "This is Billy. He's never been here before."

"We're not little!" Mike insisted.

Dipper recalled him as one of the Gnomes who had been a component part of Norman, Mabel's first crush in the Valley. Casually, Dipper said, "No, you're the right size. Oh, that reminds me—leaf blower."

"See ya!" Mike said, and he and the other Gnome, whom Dipper did not know, scuttled off.

"What are they?" Billy asked.

"Gnomes. They're little people. It's genetic. They never grow much bigger than that. There's a group of them who live here. They're just regular people, basically. They all dress like that. Some people think that's because they're descended from circus performers who settled here long ago."

"Oh," Billy said.

"Sometimes they're sensitive about not being tall," Dipper said. "Best not to mention it."

"I'll remember," Billy said solemnly.

They spent an hour in the Arcade, with Billy taking on Dipper in Fight Fighters. Dipper let the kid win.

Interestingly, Billy bypassed Rumble McSkirmish to make his player King Sackit, an enormous, muscular figure who, like Rumble, wore an eyepatch. Dipper chose Rumble for old times' sake, though he'd noticed that nowadays when he played the character, the controls often glitched. He supposed that Rumble still harbored a grudge against him for having lied about Robbie's killing his father. Anyway, he didn't care if he won or lost, so Billy was happy.

The Arcade had tons of other dinging, chiming, buzzing, and roaring games, but Dipper and Billy hogged Fight Fighters for the whole time. As they left the Arcade at noon, Billy confided, "I like that game. Even with just one eye, King could beat up anybody!"

Dipper treated Billy to lunch in Greasy's, where Lazy Susan fussed over the boy and gave him a free slice of apple pie. As they left the diner, they saw Gideon and his girlfriend Ulva coming toward them down the sidewalk, hand in hand. Dipper waved, but Ulva stared, tensed, and dragged Gideon down a side street.

Huh.

Eventually—it had to come sometime—the two of them rode over to the Mystery Shack. Billy tensed up, but they walked slowly to the gift-shop porch and nothing happened. The barrier was down—Dipper had taken care of that by digging up and carefully storing the key moonstone—and they came in to a moderately crowded sales day. Mabel, working the register, greeted them and hopped off the stool to give Billy a quick hug.

Wendy was busy in the museum—Dipper could hear her voice giving the pitch—so he and Billy poked around the gift shop for a few minutes. Billy got the giggles at some of the schlock on sale—bamboo finger traps and rubber snakes, wind-up toys including a Chinese dragon that clattered sinuously around on six pairs of legs, a Magic 8-Ball that gave only insulting answers to questions: "You are dumb to ask that." When Dipper said, "I want a second opinion!" and shook it again, the ball said, "OK, you're ugly, too."

The museum crowd spilled into the gift shop, and Dipper took Billy into the museum. "These exhibits," he said, "are mostly all fakes."

The Jackalope? Shed deer antlers that a taxidermist had attached to a stuffed rabbit's body. The Mermaid? A monkey's torso stitched to a fish tail. The Sascrotch? A combination of a ratty costume from a cheapo monster movie, which Stan had bought for peanuts at an auction, and a pair of tighty-whities from the dollar store. "Why do people pay to see them if they're fake?" Billy asked.

"Well—Soos says they're to remind people of dreams. And the exhibits are fake, but dreams are real."

Billy stared at him. " _Are_ dreams real?"

"They really happen," Dipper said carefully. "And dreams don't have to be nightmares. They can be good. And if you dream of good things, then when you wake up, you can try to make them happen."

 _That sounds so lame,_ he thought.

But Billy nodded as though satisfied with the answer. They went out onto the museum porch, and Dipper showed Billy the rock that looks like a face. "It does, kind of," Billy said. "It reminds me of something. I can't think what."

 _Well, there's another rock with a face—or at least with one eye—in a forest clearing, but I'm not showing you that!_

"Want to see my room?" Dipper asked.

Sure. So they went upstairs.

"Cool!" Billy said. "You're way up high! You can look out the window and see—" he broke off, staring at the triangular window. "Uh. See everything," he wound up, his voice trailing off.

More than once Dipper had walked into the room and caught a glimpse of the window against a yellowish sky and felt a momentary shudder. It looked a lot like Bill Cipher—in the right light. But he said to Billy, "Odd shape for a window, but up in the peak of the wall like it is, it had to be made that way to fit." Dipper had curtained off the other window, out on the landing—the one with the window seat, the one that had a design that looked very much like Cipher—and he was glad he'd remembered to do that.

He let Billy stand on the table to look out the triangular window, though. "Is that a real totem pole?" he asked.

"I think it's a replica," Dipper said. Odd, but he'd never asked Grunkle Stan about it. However, he knew that Manly Dan did carvings with a chainsaw—no, really, he could do an American Eagle in just a few hours, and he was good at it—and supposed that, if Stan had paid him, Dan could create a totem pole without much fuss. "We'll go look at it later."

"OK. You've got a lot of books." Not so many, really, just a couple of shelves, but many were oversized volumes. "What are these big books?" Billy asked, pointing at the top row.

"Journals," Dipper said. "Diaries, sort of. They're private, you know. And the others are stuff I like to read—mysteries, and paranormal phenomena and that kind of thing. I just enjoy them. They're like a hobby."

By three in the afternoon, Billy was tired out.

"Let's ride back to the McGuckets' and you can take a nap," Dipper said as they went downstairs and back into the gift shop. "So you'll be fresh for the big party."

"Hey," Wendy said with a smile, "I can take twenty minutes to drive over and pick you up, Dip, if you want to leave the bike there."

"That'll be great," Dipper said. "Give us twenty minutes to ride over before you leave, though."

They walked out. Waddles and Widdles were nosing around the yard—tourists often dropped random goodies, and they were the clean-up squad. Billy laughed. "Are those Mabel's pets? I remember she talks about them a lot."

"Yep," Dipper said. "Or they started out being pets. Now they're more like her friends."

Billy stepped off the porch. Waddles let out a surprised squeal, and he and Widdles trotted around the corner and out of sight. "I scared them," Billy said.

"Probably somebody around front dropped part of a candy apple or something," Dipper told him. "Waddles has a sixth sense about food."

"No. Animals don't like me." Billy sighed. "I don't know why."

They rode their bikes back, Billy thanked Dipper for showing him around, and then the boy went up to his bedroom, feet dragging, obviously ready for a nap. Wendy showed up right on time.

On the drive back to the Shack, she asked, "How'd it go?"

"OK," Dipper said. "A few strained moments." He told her about the water tower remark, about Billy's choice of avatars in the Arcade, about Mike the Gnome, about how Ulva had seemed alarmed at the sight of him, about Waddles and Widdles avoiding him.

"At least he didn't go, like, nuts or some deal," Wendy said.

"I think he gets flashes, but he doesn't know about Bill Cipher."

"Flashes?"

"The way he calls you 'Red' and doesn't even seem to notice it. Once or twice he's called me 'Pine Tree,' but he knows I don't like it and he hasn't done it recently. Little things like that, nothing serious. Now all we have to do is get through the party," Dipper said.

"Shouldn't be a problem."

"Let's hope not."

The party, and then the next morning Billy would go home, and—

And after that he could relax and enjoy a summer with his girl.

As Dipper had told Billy, dreams can be good.

Dreams can be good.

Too bad sometimes they're only dreams.


	10. Chapter 10

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 15, 2016)**

* * *

 **10: Surprise!**

It went down like this:

A little past seven that evening, Lorena interrupted Stanford, who was in the room he used as an office when he was in the McGucket house, sitting at the computer: "Dear, we have to go to the house right now."

"Mm?" Stanford asked. He was transcribing his older Journals into digital form, editing them on the fly into better and clearer language than his original jotted notes. "Why?" He didn't even look away from the screen.

Smiling at her preoccupied husband, Lorena said, "Because Dan says there's something we have to see. Right now."

Ford was murmuring as he typed—he was a four-fingered typist, twice as fast as a two-fingered one. ". . . Weaknesses: Leaf-blowers (MP). Dan? I'm sure you can handle it, dear. Probably wants to ask about arranging furniture. Where was I?"

"Not furniture, Stanford. It's some kind of anomaly," Lorena said. She didn't sound exasperated, because she wasn't. She had known going into the marriage that her husband was a genius but absent-minded. In fact, so far on that day, he'd given no sign at all of realizing his birthday had come round. In a louder voice, she warned, "Dan says we may have to abandon the building."

"Hmm? Abandon? Anomaly?" Stanford saved the file and stood up, his expression concerned. "That sound rather dire. You stay here. It may be dangerous. I'll get my anomaly detector."

And yet five minutes later, and carrying the small case with his field equipment, Ford climbed into the Lincoln's passenger seat, muttering, "I hope it's not something we'll have to file an insurance claim about. That's incredibly difficult where the paranormal is involved." And only when Lorena parked in front of the new house did he say, "Um—you drove. Didn't I intend to come here alone?"

"No, dear," she said. "Let's go inside and see what's up."

* * *

And it went down like this:

At the moment when Lorena parked the car, Mabel dialed her great-aunt Sheila's number and passed the word: "The Lincoln is in the grease pit!"

She said, "I understand," and turned to Stanley, who was relaxing in front of the TV, watching Celebrity Cartoon Fight Club. "Stanley, Stanford needs your help."

"Tell him to go whistle," Stan grumbled. "Didn't even wish me a happy birthday! The ingrate!"

The TV said, "Coming up next: a grudge match between Muttley and Scooby Doo."

"Stanley," Sheila said, "your brother needs your help."

"Hey, I got a dog in this fight!" Stan said. "What does Poindexter want, anyway?"

"They're moving a really heavy sofa, and apparently Stanford insists he can lift it by himself, and Lorena's worried he's going to hurt himself."

"The putz! Tell her to make him keep his shirt on. I'll be there as soon as I put on my shoes. Where are my shoes?"

"Right in front of the recliner. We're coming, Lorena."

"Look, just don't start supervisin', OK? I hate it when somebody tells me I'm doin' it wrong. OK, let's go if we're going."

On the tube, Scooby was growling at Muttley: "Roor roing rown!"

Stan cast a longing look at the TV and used the remote to switch it off.

* * *

"Guys," Wendy said, meeting Lorena and Ford on the front porch, "Dad wants you to wait right here for just a minute until he knows it's safe for you to go upstairs."

"What's happening?" Ford asked. "And why is the living room dark?"

"All the lights suddenly went off just like that," Wendy said. "Just hold on. He'll yell in a minute."

Someone tapped on Ford's shoulder, and he looked around, startled. "Stanley!"

"Yeah, yeah, where's the couch?"

Ford frowned. "What couch?"

Rolling his eyes, Stan snapped, "The heavy one!"

"Why? It's in the living room, but the lights are out."

Stan did a double take. "You got a couch with lights?"

Ford scowled at him. "What are we talking about?"

Putting his hands on his hips, Stan said, "I dunno, Poindexter. Only my half of the conversation's making sense!"

Manly Dan's voice rang out from somewhere in the house: "Come on!"

Stan recognized the voice at once. "Hey, Brainiac, if Dan's here, you don't need—"

Sheila pushed him. "Oh, go in!"

* * *

"Surprise!"

When the twins walked through the door, the lights came on—and thirty-six guests, crowded into the living room, all yelled at once. Stanford blinked and then said, "Why—Stanley, today's our birthday!"

"Oh, ya think? What gave you your first clue?" Stan asked.

A banner draped across the room read HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE MYSTERY TWINS!

"Mabel's work," Stanford said, grinning. The combination of brightly-colored letters, stars and rainbows, all sprinkled with glitter, was unmistakable.

"Right you are!" yelled Mabel. She and Dipper wheeled out a cart with Melody's enormous cake on top—three layers, with white frosting and green piping. And at the top, where a wedding cake would have had a bride and groom, was a replica of the Mystery Shack made out of graham crackers and pretzel sticks.

And a chunky blue candle shaped like a six blazed brightly next to another shaped like a nine.

"You guys sure don't look sixty-nine!" Toby Determined yelled. And that was true. They actually looked like a couple of guys at, or nearly at, fifty, courtesy of having taken a few sips from the Fountain of Youth.

"Clean livin'!" Stan said with a grin. "That's what does it for me. No idea about my brother, though!"

"Happy birthday, Uncle Stan and Uncle Ford!" Alex and Wanda said in unison.

"Thank you all—" began Ford.

From the next room—a den—came the sound of a piano. From the keyboard, Pacifica called out, "Everyone, sing!"

Then everyone sang the Happy Birthday song, and Ford and Stan blew out the candles to great applause, and then Dipper opened the sliding-glass door on the deck and the delicious aromas of steak and roasting corn drifted in.

A banquet followed. No use to catalog the food, except to say it was plentiful and tasty. Everyone ate enough and more than enough, and everyone loved Melody's cake and Mabel's decoration of it.

Out on the deck, Soos attracted an audience as he told stories of how the Shack was doing these days and of the headaches of owning a small business. Tad Strange apologized for not bringing the Sev'ral Timez boys, but they had a gig over in Portland that was too important to miss. "Aww," Stan said. "That's too bad! But I understand." The moment Tad turned away, Stan looked up toward heaven and mouthed, "Thank you!"

It was, one would have to say, a successful surprise and an enjoyable party. The town combined it with a housewarming—Lazy Susan, for example, gave both twins a set of stainless-steel cooking pots, and Mr. Poolcheck gave them both a set of barbells and a certificate to the town fitness center, and—but you get the idea. Dipper, with some diffidence, gave them each an inscribed and autographed copy of his book; Mabel gave them each a gorgeous sweater—her knitting skills had developed over the years and now she was an expert—Stan's maroon, with the fish-shape in gold, Ford's a beautiful blue with a gold six-fingered hand symbol.

Lots of laughter, lots of reminiscences (except when anybody ventured too near a memory of Weirdmageddon, a circulating Tyler was quick to murmur, "Never mind all that!" Gideon was there—his gift was a certificate for car care to each Stan, good for one year of maintenance service at his daddy's garage—and he said anxiously, "Stanley, I hope we can get beyond our former differences. Heck, I was a little crazy."

"And you're not now?" Stan asked. Then he said, "I'm kiddin'! Yeah, of course, I think we all been through enough to forgive and forget."

Tyler cleared his throat.

Off in the corner, Mr. Gleeful was in earnest conversation with Dipper's and Mabel's parents, trying to convince them that right now was the best time to trade in that little SUV, oh, my, yes indeed.

Eventually some of the guys went up the hill and next door with Stan to try out his pool table. The ladies collected in one room and chatted and laughed. Ford made the rounds and at last settled in the dining room, drinking a cup of coffee. Mabel and Dipper wished him a happy birthday again.

"Thank you both," he said. "Stanley is a lucky man—he's known you longer than I have."

"Three months!" Mabel said, laughing.

"Well, I envy him even that," Ford said. He rubbed the back of his neck, grinning shyly. "I—my upbringing made me reticent about—it's hard to—could I just say I love both of you?"

Mabel kissed his cheek. "Of course you can, you great big genius dummy-dum!"

In an equally shy tone, Dipper said, "We, uh, we love you, too. We couldn't ask for a better pair of grunkles than—"

Someone started playing the piano in the den.

Not Pacifica—she and Danny were off in a corner talking with Gideon.

The opening chords broke into a melody.

Stanford stiffened, his eyes wide with shock. Dipper looked through the door into the den, where the piano had its own spot.

Little Billy sat at the keyboard, playing a little below the correct tempo, as if his piano lessons hadn't quite progressed that far. Dipper didn't know the song, but it clearly was a melody.

However, Stanford recognized the tune instantly, and he turned pale.

"We'll Meet Again."


	11. Chapter 11

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 15, 2016)**

* * *

 **11: Don't Know Where**

Everything happened so fast that afterward, Dipper wasn't ever really sure he got the sequence completely straightened out. He hurried right behind Stanford, who went tearing into the den, his face purple with anger, his six-fingered hands clenched tight into fists.

Only one person was in the den. Dipper saw Billy, sitting perched on a cushion he'd piled onto the piano bench so he could reach the keys, carefully playing the last bit of the verse, the one that ends with the words _sunny day._ Though he was picking out the notes slowly and deliberately, they sounded true and in tune. Billy looked around with a smile—not a hateful, evil smile, Dipper thought, but a kid's smile, a happy _look-what-I-can-do_ smile.

Which changed to a gape of fear when an angry Ford bellowed, "Stop that at once!"

Dipper started to say, "Billy, it's not—" He didn't get past the _Bi_ part, because with no apparent preparation, with no warning whatever, Billy leaped off the piano bench and raced past them and into the dining room. "Stop him!" Ford said, swiping his arm as he tried to grab Billy's shirt, missing it by three inches.

Billy weaved among the still-milling guests in the dining room. The sliding doors to the deck stood open, and Billy darted out. At the same moment, Soos was heading in from the deck, carrying a big plate of ribs, probably his third or fourth. "Little dude!" he called, stopping where he was and blocking the doorway, "Be careful on the steps! It's, like, getting real dark out!"

What happened next Dipper heard more than saw: the clatter of Billy's footfalls on the wooden steps. Then came a ridiculous waltz between Ford and Soos, Soos trying his best to step out of the way, Ford inadvertently stepping the same way to get around him, Soos getting flustered, Ford growling in frustration. Dipper dived out through an opening behind Soos and thundered down the steps. "Billy! It's me! Wait, it's OK!"

Heavy dusk had settled. He couldn't see Billy anywhere. Teek and Mabel, just identifiable in the gloom, were sitting at the picnic table near the grill, and Mabel yelled, "What's wrong?"

"Tell Mom and Dad that Billy wants to have a sleepover with us!" Dipper called back. "I'll call you with details!"

Ford came down the steps, huffing. "Where is he?" he asked, taking a pistol-like device from inside his jacket. Someone came down the steps more slowly, but Dipper couldn't see who.

"Don't shoot him!" Dipper said, grabbing his great-uncle's arm. "I think that was an accident, his playing that song!" Ford had told him about the bizarre moment when Bill Cipher had appeared on the top floor of the Fearamid, accompanying his high-pitched singing on a piano. It had been _that_ song, and ever since that day, Ford couldn't stand to hear it.

In the darkness, Ford replaced his weapon in its shoulder holster. "We must find him, anyway," he muttered. Then he lowered his head. "I would only stun, Dipper, not shoot to kill. I thought you knew me better."

"He's scared," Dipper said. "He ran away somewhere—I don't know where."

"I think maybe we can help y'all," Gideon said, coming up behind him. "Ulva can follow him."

"I didn't even know she was here!" Dipper said.

Someone inside, most likely Soos, finally thought to switch on the deck and stair floodlights. Now the former kid psychic and his werewolf girlfriend stood backlighted. Ulva clung to Gideon's arm. Gideon patted her hand. "Yeah, she kinda stayed in other rooms away from Billy. She's a wee bit afraid of him."

"Smells wrong," Ulva said in a trembling voice.

"Evil?" Ford asked sharply. "You sense that he's evil?"

Ulva seemed to shrink away from his intensity. "Not—not exactly evil. But not—I do not know the human word. Not—" she warbled like a wolf warming up to howl. "Not-of-our-kin. Not wolf. Not human, either. Wrong somehow."

"Alien," Dipper murmured.

Ignoring that, Ford asked, "Can you follow his scent?"

Ulva gulped hard. "Yes. Think I can."

"We'll go 'long with y'all," Gideon said. "Help you find him." He seemed to be straining to sound casual, but missed the mark. His voice had tightened, the pitch rising as though he were still the ten-year-old con artist.

"No, you not go," Ulva said softly, trying to pull away from him. "Danger, maybe, and I strong smell fear on you. You stay here, safe."

"Ulva," Gideon said, refusing to let go of her, "I reckon you're right—I'm mighty scared. But mostly scared for you. Sometimes, when you're most scared of doin' somethin', you just gotta do it anyhow. You'll understand someday. It's a human thing."

"Good man," Dipper said.

But Ford drowned out the remark: "Let's not waste time!"

Ulva didn't change to wolf form, but she threw her head back and inhaled deeply. Then, like an excited puppy on a leash, she dragged Gideon by the hand as she hurried to the side of the yard. "That way. Up the hill."

Billy must have run up the slope, through the thicket of young pines, toward Stan's house. There he had taken a straight course, right across Stan's front yard, to the emerging footpath that led up to the yard of the Mystery Shack. Again they climbed a hill.

It was tough going—the pine boughs kept slapping them in the face. And at the top, as they first stepped out in the Shack's yard, Ulva had to pause and concentrate—though Dipper could not smell it, she said the odor of pigs distracted her. Slowly, the group circled the Shack and then she sniffed and said, "This way." Billy must have passed the pig sty and then cut right across, in front of the Museum porch, to the end of the parking lot. His trail turned right.

Which led down the Mystery Trail.

"Watch out for the Bottomless Pit," Dipper said to the others. "I'm gonna run inside for a couple of flashlights, Grunkle Ford. Soos keeps them in the gift shop in case of power failures."

"Hurry."

Dipper ran as fast as he'd ever sprinted and grabbed two long, solid flashlights, the kind that held four D-cell batteries each, one from under the check-out counter, the other from a shelf in the employees' locker room. He cut through the Museum and out that door and turned on one of the flashlights.

It threw a bright, clear beam—trust Soos, the handyman, to keep the batteries fresh—and Dipper followed it past the Bottomless Pit. The others were already halfway to the bonfire clearing. He heard a car braking behind him, in the Mystery Shack lot, but didn't even look back.

Then a few seconds later, he heard someone running, and from behind him, he heard, "Dipper! Wait up!"

"Come on, Wendy!" Dipper yelled over his shoulder. "Billy ran away. Ulva's following him!"

Wendy ran on her long legs, and the two of them easily caught up to Ford, Gideon, and Ulva. "Fear in his scent too," Ulva said. "Like wolf with hunter close on his trail. Afraid of being caught."

Ford took one of the flashlights. Dipper tried to give the other one to Wendy, but she said, "Need both hands, dude."

Oh, right. For her axe. "Gideon, here, you take it," Dipper said. "When we find him, I may be the only one he'll trust. I don't want to have anything on me that he could mistake for a weapon."

The forest scents, squirrels, deer, Gnomes, even a badger, were clouding the trail, and Ulva frequently had to stoop close to the earth to pick it up again. "Not running fast now," she said. "Hurrying though. Like fast walk. He fell here, tripped on root, I think. No blood." Then she faulted, circling. "He left the path here. Which way, which way?"

"Dudes," Wendy said, "look over to the left—showing up above the trees. Is that a light?"

Dipper felt his heart beating harder. He could see a misty glow in the air, very faint and soft, yellow but not the yellow of a campfire's aura.

It was more the color of gold.

And he thought he knew exactly where it came from.

"Hurry!" he said.


	12. Chapter 12

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 15, 2016)**

* * *

 **12: Don't Know When**

Dipper outpaced Ford and the rest as they plunged into the woods, and he burst, scratched and bleeding, from a tangle of thorny Canada buffaloberry shrubs. He saw the effigy of Bill Cipher, looking as it always did, tilted, right hand extended. Same as always.

Except for the golden glow. In the light he saw Billy Sheaffer, on the opposite side of the clearing from him, standing a few feet away from the effigy, standing still and just . . . staring at the stone triangle. Dipper started across the clearing—

And bounced off an invisible barrier. It felt almost like he'd run into a perfectly transparent rubber wall. He didn't fall, and Wendy steadied him. "What's wrong?"

She stepped past him and stopped. "See?" he asked.

"Yeah, I feel it. We gotta go round."

Clenching his teeth, Dipper rounded the clearing just on the outside of the glow. Wendy came close on his heels, and then he could hear the others struggling to find a way through the heavy undergrowth—the path, never obvious, was easy to miss in the dark. "Billy," he said, keeping his voice low and reasonable, "we were afraid you were lost."

"What is this?" asked Billy. He asked in soft wonder, the voice of a child who has just found an interesting shell on the beach.

"Just a kind of statue," Dipper said. _Oh, no. He's standing inside the glow. I can't reach him_.

"I think I dreamed about this," Billy said. He bit his lip and looked down at his feet. "I didn't hurt the piano, Dipper. Honest. I never played that song all the way through before. But everybody was happy and no one was in that room, so I sat down and tried it. I 'membered all the notes this time."

"You did good," Dipper said. "Grunkle Ford was just—kind of startled that you could play. Hey, step back here and look at this statue with me."

Billy shook his head. "You come here."

Wendy was right beside Dipper. She pressed on the invisible barrier, her palm flattening. She touched his arm. _Don't tell him we can't, Dipper._

— _Wendy, I think maybe—maybe it's time to tell him a little of the truth._

 _Your call, Dip. I got your back._

Aloud, Dipper said, "Well, it's funny, but I think right now nobody but you can get that close to the statue. But you can come to us. We won't grab you, I promise."

Billy turned back to look up at the effigy. "Why's his hand sticking out like that?"

Dipper felt something strange inside—a presence there. It was like the voice he heard in his mind when he and Wendy did their thought transference, but it was different, though familiar: _PINE TREE, BE CAREFUL. YOU COULD LOSE HIM._

— _Bill? That you?_

 _A PIECE OF ME. A LOT BIGGER PIECE IS IN THE KID HERE. THE CHUNK OF ROCK—THAT'S NOT ME. JUST A SPONGE FOR SOAKING UP THE BAD STUFF. IT'S THE DARK ENERGY THAT'S CALLING HIM. DON'T LET HIM SHAKE HANDS WITH THE EFFIGY._

Wendy was touching his arm again. _Who's in here with us? Dipper, is that Cipher?_

 _HIYA, RED! LOVE THE NEW HAIRSTYLE! YES, THIS IS BILL CIPHER, SPEAKING TO YOU OVER KBCC, BROADCASTING ALL OVER DIPPERLAND. HERE I AM TALKING FROM THE HEART OF A HEART. I'M TELLING PINE TREE WE HAVE TO KEEP THE KID FROM GRABBING THAT HAND._

This all happened in an instant. In the next, across the clearing Ford turned his flashlight on Dipper and Wendy. Dipper forced himself to move slowly as he held up his hand and made a "back off" gesture.

"Is it 'lectric?" Billy asked, taking a step toward the Cipher effigy, tilting his head, looking at the stone figure curiously. "It's glowing like it was 'lectric."

"That's just a kind of power," Dipper said. "But it's like electricity. It could really hurt you if you got too close to it. Take three steps back, Billy, away from the statue. Please. For safety. Hey, I meant to tell you, you can sleep over at the Shack tonight. Spare bed up in my room. I've got some video games you never played, and I'll tell you about the Invisible Wizard and everything."

"Huh." Without looking around, Billy said, "I get so tired of the kids at school being mean. They make fun of my eye. They call me names. I get so mad at them. I wish . . . I could just stay here. I think this statue knows me." His voice creeped Dipper out—it was without hope, dead-sounding.

"It's pretty tough," Wendy said, "for a statue to know much of anything."

"Just that I got a feeling," Billy said. "Like—like he, the thing the statue's made to look like, he knew what it's like to be picked on and bossed around all the time. Sometimes you just—just want to burn it all down."

 _AAH! WE'RE GETTING WAY TOO CLOSE TO THE BONE HERE, PINE TREE. CAN I STEER FOR A WHILE?_

— _Bill, I don't trust you!_

 _YEAH, WELL, IF THE KID SHAKES HANDS WITH THE STATUE, THE EVIL INSIDE IT AND POOLED UP IN THE GROUND UNDER IT IS GONNA FLOW RIGHT INSIDE HIM. THAT HAPPENS, THE AXOLOTL'S NOT GONNA LET HIM LIVE—OR ANYTHING ELSE ON THIS PLANET. THAT INCLUDES RED HERE, SHOOTING STAR, SIXER, STANLEY, ALL OF THEM, EVEN YOU, ALL GONNA BE WIPED OUT, KID. COME ON, LET ME DRIVE. I HAVE ONLY ONE CHANCE LEFT! I GOT AS MUCH AT STAKE AS YOU!_

 _Better do it, Dipper._

— _I don't know if I can._

 _HEY, RED, YOU WILLING TO TAKE A SPIN WITH ME AT THE WHEEL?_

 _If that's what it takes. But I got a grudge against you._

 _SHEESH, I DID A GOOD JOB WITH YOUR BANNER! RIGHT COLORS, GOOD FABRIC, EVEN LEFT YOU CONSCIOUS! OK, COME ON, PINE TREE, RED TRUSTS ME, SO IT'S UP TO YOU! TICK, TOCK!_

— _Are you gonna kick me out of my body?_

 _NOPE. SIT RIGHT BESIDE ME IN THE FRONT SEAT, KID._

— _OK. Wendy, you get out._

 _Nope. I'm goin' for this ride, too._

 _WOO-HOO! READY, RED? KEEP HOLDING ONTO PINE TREE'S ARM. HUH, LITTLE MUSCLE THERE SINCE LAST TIME I WAS INSIDE THIS BODY. WHAT A SURPRISE._

For a second, Dipper felt as if ice water were flowing into his veins. Then he seemed half awake, or in a waking dream. Everything in the world was vibrating strangely. He felt his legs move, felt his feet shuffle forward. Somehow he and Wendy melted through the barrier, and then he stood beside Billy.

What happened was bizarre. He heard himself speak, but he was not making up the words: "Hey, Billy, let me tell you a story, OK, kid? It's a true story too, and it ain't pretty. Once there was this kid who thought nobody loved him. Not his parents, not his siblings, not anybody who lived in their big house. They did, but he didn't believe it was possible anybody could love him. So what do you think he did?"

"What?" Billy asked, his gaze never leaving the Cipher effigy.

"He started a little fire in the basement. Just to teach them a lesson. But the whole house burned down, can you imagine that?"

Dipper's mind reeled, because he could see what Cipher's words really were saying—not just a house burned. An entire planet. No, an entire _universe_ —and everyone that Bill had known in life—gone, like that, in a heartbeat.

"And when the house burned, all the people that this kid thought didn't love him, they all burned too."

"To death?" Billy asked.

Dipper would have screamed if he had been in control of his body. He felt an anguish, an agony, that was a physical pain, worse than ripped flesh and exposed nerves—not his emotion, but Bill's.

But through him, Bill said, "Burned to death, Billy. Everyone the kid had ever known. And he'd thought he'd be really happy when that happened, but—he found that he had no house to live in. He wound up all alone in a horrible vacant lot, full of rats and snakes. He called them his friends."

The Nightmare Realm didn't have rats and snakes, but it did have its own kinds of paranormal vermin, a gang of interdimensional criminals and nightmares he only called friends. Among them, Bill had spent a trillion years there, his being absorbing energy, causing the dimension to decay. After the destruction of his own realm, Bill no longer slept, not ever, because sleeping brought dreams, and dreams brought guilt, and he couldn't stand the guilt.

He never slept. He never dreamed.

But . . . we dream for a reason.

Dreaming keeps us sane.

And those of us who lack dreams also lack sanity.

* * *

"What are they doin' over there?" Gideon asked.

"They appear to be reasoning with the boy," Stanford said. "I should have dynamited that damned statue!"

"'Scuse me," Gideon said, "but I don't rightly think that would do any good. I dealt with Bill Cipher, remember. That thing's just, you know, molecules, but they got a kind of power in 'em. I think it might survive a blastin'. Either not get hurt or re-form."

"I can't stand by and watch this," Ford said.

"No, is bad place!" Ulva said, tugging on his jacket.

"All the more reason. You kids stay here and keep down. I've got to help if I can."

Ford strode out from the brush and straight toward the effigy, approaching so it stood between him and the three figures in front of it. He got up speed and then—

The entire world flashed a brilliant yellow and then went dark. For an endless time, Ford drifted in interstellar space—or somewhere like it, a space within his own mind, uncharted and unstarred. Then he heard soft weeping and someone was slapping his face. "Dr. Pines! You come to now, y'hear?"

He opened his eyes. In the diffused glow of a flashlight, he saw Gideon and Ulva bending over him. "What—what happened?"

"You went a-chargin' in and hit the energy dome around that statue. It throwed you back fifteen foot into the brush. You was dead to the world."

"How—how long have I been out?"

"Not long, few seconds, maybe a half a minute. You OK?"

"I think so." Ford shuddered. "I saw—saw the exact same thing I did when Cipher transmuted my body into gold!"

"That didn't happen this time. You're OK." Gideon helped him sit up.

"The children—Dipper and Wendy—are they—?"

"Last we seen, other side of those bushes yonder, still talkin' to the little boy. Here, I'll help you stand up."

Ford got up on shaky legs. "We have to do something!"

* * *

"It talks to me," Billy mumbled. "Can't you hear it?"

"No, Billy, we can't," Dipper said. Bill had let him take control, hoping he could talk Billy down. "What's it saying?"

"It wants to make a deal with me. It says it's lonely. If I shake its hand, it'll be my friend forever."

"Don't believe him, kid!" Bill again, speaking through Dipper. "He says he's happy, but he's a liar! Know who that represents, Billy? It's the kid I told you about—the one who burned down everything he knew and everybody who might have loved him! He's crazy, Billy! Don't let him lie to you!"

Inside his body, Dipper was watching. Billy inched closer to the effigy, and they had come forward too, he and Wendy, holding hands and taking a baby step at a time. His skin crawled. Flickering from the outstretched stick-figure fingers of the Cipher effigy, blue flames had silently burst out. They were dim, they were weak, but there they flowed.

Dipper remembered Cipher urging him to shake hands that time Mabel was obsessing on her puppet show: "I'm ready to make a deeee-al!"

Those blue flames. That outstretched hand.

Whispering, Billy said, "I'll just—touch it."

The boy stretched his arm up, not quite able to reach the effigy's hand. He stood on tiptoe—

Wendy yelled, "Look out!"

In Dipper's brain, Cipher screamed "NOO!"

Wendy's axe split the air, cracked against something, cutting right through the stretching arm—

Everything went dark.


	13. Chapter 13

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 15, 2016)**

* * *

 **13: Lost**

"Dipper," Wendy asked, "where are we? What is this place?"

"I—I think it's the Mindscape," Dipper said. "Only—it's all crazy."

The surroundings were a charcoal-sketch nightmare of wrong angles, done in shades ranging from black to light gray. Hills reared around them. Trees leaned at fifty degrees and more. Mountains hovered upside-down above their heads. Things swooped through the murky air—winged, shrieking things, impossible to identify, their insane screams tearing at his ears. The gray air smelled of sulfur. Here and there dull yellow glows broke the gloom—eyes that belonged to no face, that merely floated.

Wendy still gripped her axe. "OK, it's the Mindscape. How do we get home?"

Tasting despair on his tongue like a bitter, sour lump of gall, Dipper said, "I don't know. I don't know if we can!"

Wendy's axe glowed blue. The light pulsated. "Where's Billy?" Wendy asked, looking around. This unholy landscape looked wrong, looked like the terrifying Gustave Doré steel engravings that illustrated Dante's _Inferno_. Except this was a Hell abandoned even by the demons and the damned souls, a wasteland, an empty Inferno. "See him anywhere?" Wendy asked. Her voice sounded, well, not confident exactly, but determined.

They looked all around—no Billy. No anybody. They called his name, and nobody answered. The two agreed that they seemed to be standing in an insane version of the clearing where the Cipher effigy stood—but no effigy, either, just an irregular swirled splotch of ultimate darkness, dense and impenetrable, like India ink spilled into water and frozen there into ice. "Bill?" Dipper asked. "Are you here?"

Only silence answered him.

"Dipper," Wendy said her voice finally sounding uncertain and a little frightened, "I think maybe we're dead."

* * *

For the second time, a silent explosion knocked Ford off his feet, smashing the wind out of him. He gasped, and then when he pulled himself back up, he glimpsed his flashlight, still shining, on the ground a few feet away, and he crawled on hands and knees to retrieve it. Hanging onto a slender tree trunk, Ford rose to his feet. "Kids! Where are you?"

"Unnhh—here we are," Gideon said. He and Ulva, disheveled and with cobwebs and twigs in their hair, pushed their way out of the underbrush.

"Mason!" Ford yelled, more loudly. "Wendy!" The beam of the flashlight found the Cipher effigy, still standing enigmatic in its clearing. A huddled figure in a yellow sweater sprawled face-down on the ground twenty feet away from it—and the effigy no longer glowed. Ford ran over. Billy Sheaffer lay unconscious, but breathing. Ford looked all around. No trace of Wendy or Dipper. Ford took out his cell phone and speed-dialed a number.

"Yeah?" Stan said at once, his voice loud against background chatter and laughter. "Where'd you get off to—?"

"Stanley, no time. Listen. Do you know where that stone figure of Bill Cipher stands?"

A pause, and then Stanley growled, "Yeah, I oughta! If you hadn't told me not to do it, I woulda blown it up by now! Why?"

"It's where I am. Get here right away, quick as you can. Take the golf cart or the tram as far as you can along the trail. Something's happened. Billy Sheaffer's been injured, and Wendy and Dipper are missing. They may be hurt and unconscious. I have to get Billy back to my lab as soon as I can—but somebody has to find Dipper and Wendy!"

"On my way," Stan said. "And also, I'm bringin' a shotgun and my brass knucks!"

"Bring a tactical flashlight!" Ford said, and hung up. To Gideon, he said, "You kids couldn't carry Billy. I'm going to ask you to do something that's very brave. Come with me as far as the trail, and then wait for my brother Stanley. If you can stand it, guide him back here and help him look for Dipper and Wendy. Please."

"I'll do it," Gideon said, though he spoke with obvious dread. "But maybe Ulva should go back with you, in case there's danger."

"I will stay," Ulva said quietly, holding his hand. "I will help look. I can find their scent."

"You're a wonderful girl, Ulva," Ford said. "I—ugh, come on." He had begun to tear up, and he didn't want them to see him break down.

The three of them, with Ford carrying the still form of Billy doubled over his shoulder, found the difficult crooked path that led back to the Mystery Trail. Before they reached it, they heard the puttering of the tram engine, and as they stepped out of the woods, Stan braked, the detached engine coughing itself to a halt. He hopped out, cradling a shotgun under his left arm. "Kid dead?" he asked.

"No, just knocked out. Injured."

"Take the tram back. I got my flashlight and I know how to get to the clearing. You tried calling Wendy and Dipper on their phones?"

"Uh—no," Ford admitted. Though he had the hang of cell phones now, he sometimes forgot that everyone carried one.

"Figures. Don't bother, I tried as I drove out, no answer from either one. I'll check back in with you when I find them."

"Here," Ford said, handing his flashlight to Gideon. "Gideon and Ulva are going to help you search. Stanley—this is important—whatever you do, don't touch the effigy, understand? The Bill Cipher statue, I mean."

Stanley sounded angry: "I know what _effigy_ means. If that little runt's hurt Dipper or Wendy—"

"I don't think Billy did anything to them—"

"I _meant_ the triangle runt, Ford!"

"Sorry, sorry, but I'm—well I'm just not sure what happened. Go, Stanley! Don't waste time!"

Ford got into the tram car with Billy and made a U-turn for the Shack.

"You determined to go with me, Gideon?" Stanley asked.

"I want to help," Gideon insisted.

"Huh. I take back at least a quarter of all the mean things I said about you over the years. Let's go. This way."

Stanley had visited the clearing a good many times, drawn by—well, he didn't really know by what. Ford had told him he had heroically taken out Bill Cipher, but to tell the truth, Stan couldn't remember any of that. His recollection ended with Cipher's extending his hand, in the belief he was about to enter Ford's mind.

After that—Stan's memory sort of burned out.

Stan led the way, using the bright beam of his tactical flashlight to pick out the trail, and the hike took them only five or six minutes. They arrived at the clearing, where Stan said, "Wait a minute." He broke open the shotgun and popped in two red shells. "You kids stay behind me." Holding the weapon in his right hand and the flashlight in his left, Stan began to scan the ground. "Huh. Looks like somethin' exploded."

All the old leaf mold and fallen pine needles had blown outward from the Cipher effigy, making a splash of dead leaves ten yards in diameter. Bits of the stuff hung from the boughs of the standing pines around the perimeter, dangling from as much as ten feet above Stan's head. "Can you scent anything, sugar?" Gideon asked. "Find their scents, I mean?"

"All smells wrong, but I try." They walked slowly went around the edge of the clearing, clockwise. Ulva sniffed and snuffled. Three times she got down on her hands and knees. "Pine smell makes it hard. I get little sniffs of them, but can't find trail. Move further out. Maybe they flew a long way through the air. They were closer than we were."

As they made their slow circuit, Stan kept murmuring something so softly that Gideon couldn't hear him. "Please be all right, be all right," Stanley muttered, over and over, the way a more religious man might repeat a prayer.

* * *

Dipper squeezed Wendy's hand. "I don't _think_ we're dead," he said. "You feel real."

 _You too. Hey, is our mind magic working?_

— _I'm reading you loud and clear, Lumberjack Girl. Huh. You're not afraid._

 _Not as long as we're together._

— _I'm afraid. Bill? Are you in here? Is this your Mindscape?_

 _Don't think he's gonna answer, Dip._

— _Guess not. Maybe he can't. Let's see if we can reach those yellow glows._

It really was like slogging through a nightmare, the kind where you run and run and can't get anywhere. It was a place where effort and result had no relation to each other. Like those dumb crappy movies where the mummy, which can only shuffle along at the speed of an anesthetized turtle, always catches up with Chadley and Trixandra, who are doing their best impressions of champion long-distance runners, or even fleeing in a 1955 Chevy Bel Air convertible.

The mummy always caught up.

Dipper and Wendy struggled to make any progress, but at last they reached the glowing eye-shaped lights—and Wendy said, "Man! They're just markings on birch trees, that's all!"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "I've thought once or twice they look like eyes. Wait, I remember something. It's real foggy, but there was a rhyme about Bill Cipher. Uh, three sixty-degree angles, something like that—what was the line? 'Sixty degrees that . . . come in threes, Watches from within birch trees.'"

"What does that even mean?" Wendy asked.

"I think . . . it may be how Bill used to know everything we were doing. How he used to spy on us all. Hold my hand."

"What are you gonna do?"

"Just look into this yellow eye-shaped light. But I'm really scared."

"Don't be, dude. Whatever happens, we're together."

She squeezed his hand, and he took a deep breath. "If I go nuts or something—knock me out, OK?"

"You won't go nuts."

Shivering, Dipper leaned close and squinted into the light.

And saw . . . "Grunkle Stan!"

"What?" Wendy asked.

"He's right in front of us! Right there! And I see, um, Ulva . . . crawling on the ground? And there's Gideon, holding a flashlight! They're looking for something."

" _Us,_ dude," Wendy said. "They're looking for us! Can we signal them?"

"Grunkle Stan!" Dipper yelled as loud as he could.

A belch of hot air, stinking of rot, rolled over them. The window into the real world went out, and darkness fell.

* * *

"Peppermint," Ulva said, snapping her head back. "I just smelled for a second peppermint!"

"Like gum?" Gideon asked.

"Nah, nah, that's Dipper and Wendy!" Stan said. "See if you can pick it up again!"

"Listen," Gideon said. "What's that?"

"Night bird of some kind, chatterin' in the distance," Stanley said impatiently. "Not important. Hey, Wendy! You there? Dipper! Dipper Pines!"

If they'd been in the South, Stan would have identified the distant chattery sound not as a bird, but as a cicada—he'd heard them often enough, when he'd been grifting in Columbia, South Carolina, and later in Macon, Georgia. He'd been there, hawking his StanCo products, in July and August one year before being chased out of both states. The sound of cicadas had kept him awake too many nights in cheap motels with too-thin walls.

 _Yeah,_ he thought, _this sounds like a cicada._

But it was like something else he'd heard before, too. He didn't mention that.

The faint sound—which might have come from the stone effigy, now a good way behind them, if stone could make a sound—was also like mocking laughter: "Ah hah-hah-hah-hah!"

Between his teeth—real now, since his drink from the Fountain of Youth he'd regrown a full set—Stan said in a voice too low for Gideon to hear, "You just wait until I catch you!"

Ulva had sharper hearing. She didn't like the sound of his words.

And she was afraid of the metallic, oily, reeking smell of the shotgun, which always spoke sharply, always one loud word that meant _death._

* * *

Wendy and Dipper fought their way to a second eye-spot. It was maddening—they stood on what looked like level ground, but approaching the spot felt like climbing a steep and slippery slope. Dipper was panting with effort. "Ford—says that Bill—told him once—that if anybody drew—the triangle and eye symbol—Bill could use it—to spy on what was happening—in our dimension."

"That design's even on the dollar bill," Wendy said.

"Yeah—Cipher's doing, supposedly—he influenced—Washington and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—to design the Great Seal the way they did."

"Spooky." Wendy reached out and hooked her axe head around the distorted trunk of another birch tree. "OK, I'll hang on to you. You take a look."

Dipper practically had to chin himself. The birch trunk seemed to be horizontal now. Grunting, sweating, he peeked into the light.

"The Shack," he said, keeping his voice soft. Yelling didn't seem to have good effects. "Uh—there's Ford, going inside, carrying something—it's Billy Sheaffer! Or his body."

"Is _he_ dead?" Wendy asked.

"Can't tell."

"How come he isn't in here with us?"

"Don't know," Dipper admitted. "Except—we're not from this place, this dimension. Maybe he is, or partly. Maybe this is the way things look to him in the Mindscape. I don't know, maybe somehow—we're in his mind? _Oof_!" The world had just revolved and had dumped him and Wendy on the ground as the birch straightened itself.

"Does the Mindscape exist if the person, whatever, dreaming it is dead?" Wendy asked as they picked themselves up.

"I think . . . the Mindscape is a dimension everybody visits in their dreams. But everybody sees it in different ways," Dipper said. He stood up and looked through the light again. "Whoa, now I can see inside the Shack—there goes Ford, opening the secret door to his lab. Down the stairs, and now he's gone. I wonder what he's doing!"

* * *

Ford carried the still-unconscious Billy Sheaffer into the elevator, then rode down to the third level—the heavily shielded one. He had no bed or sofa there, so he made do with a lab table, stretching the ten-year-old boy out on his back. He turned on three goosenecked floor lamps. In their glare, Billy lay pale, but breathing steadily. Ford felt his pulse. Not too strong, but regular.

"Damn it," Ford said. "I swore I'd never do this again, but—"

He opened a safe and took out a device that looked a little like a futuristic gun. It had been Fiddleford McGucket's invention originally, and God knew it had already caused too much trouble. But if Cipher had somehow taken over Billy Sheaffer—and if he was the old Cipher, the insane megalomaniac chaotic demon—what Ford intended had to be done.

Ford calibrated the memory eraser. This was a more advanced version of the device than the prototype that the Society of the Blind Eye had used. It could obliterate the memory not only of a given event, but even of a specific time frame.

He set it to erase everything that Billy might have remembered from nine PM to ten-thirty PM. More than enough to obliterate his recollection of playing the piano, running away, finding the statue in the woods—finding it? Drawn to it! Somehow the dark side embodied in the effigy had called the boy.

Hoping he wasn't about to do more harm than good, Ford made sure the device was fully charged. Then, regretfully, he aimed it at Billy's head.

"I'm sorry for this," Ford told the sleeping child.

And then he fired.


	14. Chapter 14

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 15-16, 2016)**

* * *

 **14: Hello to the Folks that I Know**

Mabel had relayed to her mom and dad the message that Dipper had yelled to her: Billy was going to sleep over in the Shack. "All right," Dad had said, "but we'll be over to pick him up at eight sharp so we can get on the road home. Make sure he's had breakfast and is ready to go. We'll bring his things."

And that, as far as Mabel knew, was that—no one had paused to tell her everything that was going on, and she and Teek were still wrangling over the question of college plans and their future together—if any. All in all, she felt a little distracted. When she turned in at eleven that evening, she had no idea that at that moment Ford was driving the tram down the trail toward the Shack. She was asleep by the time he let himself in and took the unconscious Billy down to his lab.

Some little time later she started to dream.

She wasn't—exactly—in Mabel Land, but she was in dreamland. There was a dance, and she was the only girl there. All the others were her boyfriends. She danced with Alexander Hamilton (first a minuet, then the Lambada), and with Mermando (kinda hard, because he had to be held off the floor so his tail wouldn't drag, and he was especially heavy with a fishbowl full of water over his head so he could breathe), and with Craz and Xyler, together and separately, with Gabe, who was now a marionette on strings, with so many others, and all the time Teek stood in a corner looking sad.

"Mabel."

"You can have the next dance," she promised in a sweet voice. Then she did a double-take. "Dipper? What are _you_ doing here?"

"Wendy's here, too," Dipper said. "Listen! We're trapped in the Mindscape."

Mabel blinked as all the boyfriends—including Teek—vaporized around her. "What in the which now?"

Dipper rolled his eyes. "Look, you remember when we had to go inside Grunkle Stan's mind while he was asleep?"

"Yeah, I do! I had kittens for fists!" Mabel said. "That was so cool!"

"That's what's happening now!" Dipper said. "Sheesh, focus! Listen: we were at the Cipher effigy and something blew up, and now Grunkle Stan and Ulva and Gideon are out looking for our bodies, but we're not there—we got somehow blown into the Mindscape. You have to find Ford and tell him to help us find a way back! And you should have danced with Teek! You're driving the poor guy crazy!"

"That's the whole idea!" she snapped.

"Mabes—listen to your brother."

Mabel blinked. "Wendy! Ooh! You're a beautiful centauretteicorn!"

"I'm what—oh, no, you didn't!"

Dipper looked at her. His girlfriend had the body of a white horse, a glorious long red mane, and a silver horn projecting from her forehead. Her, well, hide and human skin both glistened, as though coated with oil and sprinkled with glitter. And she wore no, um, shirt. "Mabel, stop that!" Dipper said, taking off his sport jacket and draping it over Wendy's shoulders.

"I'm not _trying_ to do it!" Mabel said. "You can't control your dreams, you know!"

Wendy was pawing the earth with her right front hoof. Dipper squeezed her hand. "Look, just wake up and go find Ford! He's in his lab!"

"Five more minutes?" Mabel asked.

"Mabel," Wendy threatened, brandishing her axe, "if you don't wake up right now, Dip and I are gonna imagine real strong that you're not cute anymore!"

" _Gah!"_

Mabel's eyes popped open. She looked wildly around, but her room was just her room. The bedside clock showed it was nearly midnight. Frowning, she mumbled, "Did I just dream that?"

One way to find out. She took her phone from its recharging dock and dialed Grunkle Stan's number. He answered right away: "Hello?" His voice sounded frantic.

"Grunkle Stan, Dipper came to me and told me you're looking for him—"

"He's back?" Stan asked. "For cryin' out loud, he shoulda called—"

"He came to me in a dream," Mabel said.

"In a dream." Stan sounded on the verge of tears.

"Look, come back to the Shack. I don't think you'll find them out there. But maybe Ford can help." She hung up and got out of bed. Without bothering about a robe, she put on her bedroom slippers and padded out through the gift shop and opened the concealed door. Then down the stairs. Ford wasn't on the first or second lab levels, but she found him on the third.

Billy Sheaffer, apparently asleep, sat slumped in a chair. Ford stood next to him, taking his pulse. He whirled when he heard Mabel, holding up a gun of some kind.

"Don't shoot!" she said, throwing her hands in the air.

At the sound of her voice, Billy stirred and mumbled something unintelligible. Ford held up his hand to silence Mabel. "Billy," he said. "Wake up."

"Humn?" He opened his eyes—the real one and the prosthetic. "Um. Hi, Mr. Pines. Hi, Mabel. Is the party over?"

Still holding up his hand, Ford asked gently, "What do you remember?"

Billy frowned. "Um. Cake. And singing 'Happy Birthday.' You had a piano. And, um. I fell asleep, I guess."

"Come on," Ford said, smiling. "It's past your bedtime."

"Take him up to the attic," Mabel said.

They did, putting him in Mabel's old bed. Ford had to carry Billy. He was so groggy that Mabel doubted he'd even remember being in the lab, and he was back asleep in a few moments. Then, sitting on the top step, Ford heard Mabel out. "How vivid was this dream?" he asked.

"Well—I was having a really pleasant one about dancing, but Dipper interrupted and told me that he and Wendy had been out at the Cipher statue for some reason and there was an explosion or something, and they found themselves trapped in the Mindscape."

Ford blinked. He hadn't mentioned the Cipher effigy. "That sounds as if they were actually in contact with you," he said. "Ways to come back from the Mindscape, ways to come back from the Mindscape—I need to see if I can get in touch with them myself. Let's go down to the parlor."

There he stretched out on the sofa and said, "I'm gong to put myself under autohypnotism, Mabel. I'm going to tell myself that you can awaken me by calling me 'Great-Uncle Stanford.'"

"But I never call you—"

"I know," he said. "That's why it'll be a signal that you need me to wake up. But only do that if I show signs of stress or agitation. Just sit back and be quiet for a few minutes. Don't let anyone else disturb me."

"Gotcha."

Ford closed his eyes and began the meditative process of autosuggestion.

* * *

He hit the right level of lucid dreaming and looked around. He stood in a vast open space—not empty, just open. Galaxies whirled in the starry sky above. Here was an ultra-modern lab with equipment he'd conceived but never built. There was a work table with reams of intricately plotted graphs, charts, and scattered pages of dense mathematics. Telescopes, microscopes, arcane instruments, computers that projected holographic displays—

"It's like a science nerd's paradise," said Wendy.

The voice came from above. Ford looked up. A hundred feet in the air, standing on nothing, Dipper and Wendy looked down at him. "Grunkle Ford!" Dipper said. "Can you help us?"

"Come down and let's talk."

"Uh, there's no stairs, Dr. P," Wendy said.

"There will be if you imagine them. Come down. You can't get hurt here."

Holding hands, Wendy and Dipper took a step—and a step appeared, floating in air to support them. They came down gingerly, but each step they took was on a suddenly extant floating platform. Dipper said, "Grunkle Ford! Is this how you see us?"

"What now?" Wendy asked. She looked at Dipper. He wore a long white lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses. "Me, too?" she asked.

"You look like a woman scientist," Dipper confirmed. "You've got a lab jacket, and, um, you still have your axe, and, um. You know—you don't look bad in glasses!"

"At least I just got two feet," Wendy said. "And I still have my axe." She hefted it.

"What happened to Billy—?" Dipper began.

"He's all right, I believe," Ford said. "My instruments detected no change in him, no signs of possession or—well, of occult powers. He's just a ten-year-old boy still. But he won't remember anything past sitting down at the piano. Right now the important thing is to get you back. Let me ask you—before you came here, where were you?"

"At Mabel's dance party," Wendy said. "Ugh! I had the worst craving for hay!"

"Before that," Dipper said, "we were in this—chaotic landscape. Nothing was right. And the Shack was just a charred ruin. But we could look through these eye spots in trees and see the real world."

"Cipher's Mindscape," Ford said. "Is he still inside you, Dipper?"

"I—don't know. I haven't been able to talk to him. He was before everything blew up."

"He must still be around, but weakened," Ford said. "Didn't he once tell you that if he pulled his molecules from your heart—"

"I'd die, yeah," Dipper said. "How did this happen? How'd we get kicked off the real world and into this place?"

"Whatever occurred when you were near the Cipher effigy effectively turned reality inside out. The explosion threw Billy clear, but you two must have been caught in the paranormal field and dragged through into the Mindscape. Now you have to break through the walls and somehow get back to the real world."

"How do we do that?" Wendy asked.

"I—don't know," Ford admitted. "If you were asleep, you could just wake up, but evidently it's the remnant of Cipher that's sleeping, or dormant, at least. Hmm. You're not far away, in a paranormal sense. The Mindscape touches the real world. But breaking through the barrier . . . let me think."

"Hurry," Dipper said. "The longer we're in here, the harder it is to keep from being yanked back into chaos."

"In my travels through the Multiverse," Ford said, "I did encounter a few people who seemed able to effect temporary gaps in the fabric of existence. There were an unpleasant elderly scientist and his grandson, who had this portal gun—similar in concept to the machine I built, but portable and unstable, so each portal lasted only a few seconds. But I don't know how to contact them. Let me see, let me see—a strange alien lady with a—well, it sounds crazy, but an orange flame floating over her head. She navigated with scissors. She could just cut a passage in space and time with them. I suspect they were no ordinary scissors, however. I _could_ try the prototype portal in my lab, but you'd never fit through."

"Stand back," Wendy said.

Ford blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"Anything scissors can do," Wendy said with a serious kind of grin, "an axe can do. And this is an axe that exists in two realities, so let me try it. What do I do? Chop the air?"

"Well, the scissors—yes, the flame lady just opened them, held them in front of her—wait, you're inside the Shack, and Mabel's here. Can you go outside? If it works, that would be safer."

"Grunkle Ford," Dipper said, "we don't know where outside is!"

"But in the chaotic Mindscape you saw its ruins?"

"Yeah," Wendy said.

"All right. I'm going to wake myself up. You'll be thrown back into the chaotic Mindscape. Find the outside of the Shack and then try it. Mabel and I are in the parlor! Good luck!"

"Will it work?" Dipper asked.

"I honestly don't know, but you have to try! Goodbye!"

Ford made a kind of gasp and the nerdish Mindscape vanished, and Dipper and Wendy stood back in the hellish realm of no colors and twisted trees and things that flew shrieking overhead. Their ordinary clothes returned, too.

And before them, crumbling and flaking, was a rotting, decaying Mystery Shack, or the ruins of it.

"I think we're back in the upside-down world," Dipper said.

"Get behind me, man. Put your arms around me. Whatever happens, don't let go. I can't lose you now."

Dipper stood pressed against her, his arms around her waist, his right hand gripping his left wrist. "Ready."

Something without a throat of flesh roared not far away.

"Here goes, dude," Wendy said. She raised the shining axe high and brought it down hard, hard enough to cut through an inch of oak, hard enough to slice through—

The whole world made a sound like silk ripping.


	15. Chapter 15

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 16, 2016)**

* * *

 **15: As You Saw Me Go**

Ford said he would keep watch on the gift-shop porch, Mabel on the small porch outside the family entrance. "If they make it through," Ford Told Mabel, "it should be quite soon. They may be disoriented—interdimensional travel can do that—so if they need help, offer it, but be careful in approaching them. Wendy has her axe, and if she perceives you as a monster, well, no telling what might happen."

"Understood and roger that!" Mabel said. She took up her position, but not before arming herself with her grappling hook.

On the other porch, Ford shifted from foot to foot, nervously, staring into the darkness. After a few minutes, he heard someone approaching. "Mason!" he called. "Wendy!"

"Guess again, Poindexter," came Stan's voice from the darkness. "For cryin' out loud, why're you here in the dark? Go turn on the outside lights!"

"Oh. Sorry." Ford stepped back inside long enough to switch on the parking-lot and sign lights, then came back out as Stan, still carrying the shotgun stepped up onto the porch. "Did you see either—"

"We saw nobody," Stan said. He brandished his weapon, shaking it as if it were a spear. "I felt like blastin' that freak Cipher's statue, but you said no."

Ulva and Gideon stood on the lawn near the corner of the porch, just staring at the two elder Pines Twins.

"I think that attempting to destroy the effigy would be extraordinarily dangerous," Ford told his brother. "It might land you in the Mindscape, as it seems to have done with Wendy and Dipper. I've been in contact with them. They're all right, but trapped between dimensions right now. They're trying a possible way to come back—I don't know if their method will work—but if worst comes to worst, I think I can at least contact them again. Everyone, please come up and stand on the porch."

He noticed that Ulva was shivering as she clung to Gideon. "I won't let anything hurt you," the platinum-haired boy said. Stan rather ostentatiously stood beside Ford—on the opposite side from Gideon and his girlfriend. "How long's this gonna take?" he asked

Ford shook his head. "I have no way of judging."

Stan glanced over at the parking lot. "Soos not back yet?"

Ford, sweeping the empty lawn with his gaze, murmured, "I surmise that he and Melody are still cleaning up after the party."

Stan said, "Nice of the kids to throw the surprise party for us. Good cake."

"Yes."

"When are they comin' back, Sixer?"

Ford sighed. "Stanley—I don't know." He took a breath. "I don't even know if they can."

* * *

Mabel sat on the edge of the smaller porch. When she'd first come to the Shack, her feet wouldn't touch the ground when she did that. Now that she was taller, they were on the earth. Which was more than she could say for her brother and Wendy. "Come on, you guys," she said out loud.

Crickets answered her, but _chirp-chirp_ wasn't exactly the reply she wanted.

She put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. _I messed up again,_ she thought. She never said that out loud—well, nearly never. She always professed that everything she did was right, everything she said was right, all the time, every time. Confidence, that was one of her key virtues.

Or was it a virtue? In her mind, she traced back the train of events. This wouldn't have happened if Billy hadn't gone out to the statue. He wouldn't have gone out to the statue if he hadn't been at the party. He wouldn't have been at the party if she hadn't kept telling him how much fun Gravity Falls was, and if she hadn't persuaded Billy's parents to let him come and her parents to drive him up.

"It's all my fault," she muttered. Mentally, she added, _From a certain point of view. Oh, great, now I'm thinking like Obi-Wan Kenobi!_

"What's wrong with me?" she asked the night in a morose voice. This, and all the frustrating business with Teek—they kept making gestures to patch things up, and she _wanted_ to go back to the way they were before all this junk happened, but—somehow, and she didn't know exactly how, every time they talked, one of them would say something out of line.

Not because either Teek or Mabel wanted to hurt the other one, but—gah! Somehow now talking to Teek was like trying to walk a tightrope. And he was the same with her. One innocent remark and the other one jumped all over it.

Like this:

Mabel: "Teek, I know you can succeed anywhere you want to go to school."

Teek: "Yeah—but I can't _afford_ to go to school in Los Angeles."

Or like this:

Teek: "Mabel, I'm just not happy being away from you."

Mabel: "Oh, yeah? Then why do you want to go off to be with those Southern belles?"

And either way, they dropped right back into bickering. In a way, it would be better if they could just break up and be done with it, she thought more than once. And yet—

"I love him," Mabel confessed to the night. "I guess I really do love him. I don't want to fight with him, I don't want to even think about breaking up, but we going round and round. Agh! Romance, why you have to be so cray-cray? Why do things have to be so crappy?"

She tried to chase those worries out of her mind. She'd told herself she'd really be in for it when Dipper got back. He was not going to be happy with her.

If he got back.

"But you gotta come back," she said out loud. "You just gotta!"

* * *

"This . . . isn't the Mystery Shack," Dipper said.

Wendy stood close to him, wary, her axe still poised. "Yeah. Any idea where we are, dude?"

Dipper looked around. "Well—the sky's orange. The clouds are brown. The trees are—weird. Almost like they're growing upside-down, with their roots in the air. And—we're standing in some kind of desert-y canyon."

"So—are we even on Earth?" Wendy asked, craning back at the tall, sheer walls on either side of them—sandstone, it looked like. It was fine-grained, a pale orange color, only a shade darker than the sky.

"I . . . don't think so," Dipper admitted. "But before we try anything else, we need to get out of this canyon and into the open and look around."

"Don't think we can climb it, Dip," Wendy said. "It's like twenty feet up, no handholds or anything, and it's just about six feet too wide for us to try to chimney up."

"Let's see if it leads anywhere."

"Which direction?"

Dipper shrugged. "We don't know where it comes from or where it goes, so you pick."

She pointed with her axe. "This way, then."

The air felt warm—nearly desert-warm, and certainly dry—though Dipper couldn't see the sun. It was almost as if the sky itself were the sun: he could feel heat radiating down from it. The canyon wound, so at any given point, they could only see a few feet ahead of them and a few feet behind. Then it started to widen.

And after half an hour of walking, they stopped, staring. "What's that?" Wendy asked.

Dipper swallowed. "It's—a woman?"

"Dude, she's got _horns_!"

Twenty feet ahead, standing near the base of one of the canyon walls, stood someone in—a full-skirted ball gown? An _orange_ ball gown? She didn't look normal. Her skin was a pale gray, nearly white, and she had vivid red hair even longer than Wendy's had been before she cut it, so long it dropped to within an inch of the ground, spread out like a cloak, and her bangs fell completely over her right eye. She was idly filing her nails and didn't give any sign of noticing them.

They walked toward her and heard her humming. "Her head's on fire," Dipper said.

"Looks kinda like it," Wendy said. "And her arms are all sort of spiky. I think she's some kind of monster."

"Hey, I resent that," the woman said in an off-hand way. She tucked her nail file into the bodice of her gown and looked up. Good Lord, she had fangs! "Took you long enough," she said. "Get ourselves in a little trouble dimension-hopping did we? Amateurs!"

They approached her. She stood just a tiny bit taller than Dipper, a fraction shorter than Wendy. She crossed her arms and with a smile asked, "So I take it you're related to Stanford Pines?"

"No," Wendy said.

"I am," Dipper said. "I'm his great-nephew."

"Yeah, right, great, I see. Mm-hmm. Not as smart as him, though," the woman said. "OK, what did you clowns use to make your dimension jump?"

Wendy held out her axe.

The woman stretched out her hand. "May I?"

"I don't think so," Wendy said. "This is a family heirloom."

The woman's eyes were orange, the sclera yellow. She rolled the visible one as though exasperated. "Oh, please. Look, I'm the expert, hon. I promise I'll return it, and I won't damage it."

"I'm gonna hold onto the handle," Wendy said. "But you can look at it."

The woman shrugged. "OK, that's a fair compromise." She touched the blade and took a close look at it. She even sniffed it. "Impressive. Not the technique I'd use, but it works, sort of. Not any sense of direction, though. I wouldn't try it again if I were you. What if you'd landed in the Nightmare Realm?"

"What?" Dipper asked.

"Oh, you would've died. You're just lucky I had felt Cipher's awakening and was scanning the dimensions for him."

She turned loose of the axe, and Dipper asked her, "Do you know Bill Cipher?"

"He and I aren't on a first-name basis, but yeah, I've run across his tracks here and there in the Multiverse. We have kind of a history. I could tell he was active somewhere, so I began to look for him, and I happened to sense Stanford when he was in what he calls the Mindscape, talking to you. No telling where you two would've wound up if I hadn't snagged you when you left the dream world. You can thank me for surviving, because I brought you here."

"You couldn't have sent us home instead?" Dipper asked.

With a chuckle, she asked a question herself: "Eh, where's the fun in that?"

"Look, who are you?" Dipper demanded.

She laughed, not just a little chortle, but a full-throated bark of amusement. "You Earth boys are all alike. So impulsive. Don't worry yourself about my name, sweetie. The only thing you need to know is I can get you home again."

"Do it," Wendy said.

With a wicked grin, the woman said, "Earth girls are impetuous, too! Do you even know where you want to go? Which dimension are you from? Be exact!"

"Dimension forty-six apostrophe backslash," Dipper said.

"Smarter than you look," the woman said as the flame over her head flickered. "All right, yes, I can send you there. But there's a little catch. You've got to prove yourselves worthy first! Let's play a game. If you win, I'll send you right back to your home. If I do—nuh-uh, no trip for you. You stay stuck here until you can figure another way to go."

"This isn't a game," Dipper said. "Not to us. Look, we've got family—"

"Oh, don't give me a sob story," the woman said, inspecting her newly-filed nails. "I'm a teensy bit bored, OK? So if you can do just one little thing, then I'll admit you're worthy and open the way for your return."

"What is it?" Dipper said.

She leaned so close her nose was nearly touching hers. She pointed at the flame over her head—not touching her head, but hovering a few inches in the air. "You see this little flame? All you have to do to win is simply blow—"

 _Whoosh!_

"It's out." Wendy had leaned in and puffed.

The woman rolled her eyes upward. "Well. Look at that. Well-played, fellow redhead! Well-played." She laughed again, as if delighted by this turn of events. "All right, that wasn't much, but while it lasted I at least wasn't bored. Get ready, and I'll open the way." From her bodice she took a pair of—

"Scissors?" Dipper asked. "Seriously?"

"Interdimensional scissors, Earth boy," she said. She opened them. "See you around sometime, handsome. Oh—if you happen to run into Bill Cipher—tell him his old nemesis said he's _still_ a turd!"

Gracefully, she used the scissors to slice an oval opening in the air itself.

And through it Dipper saw darkness—and the Shack, with the lights on—and on the porch, Mabel, sitting with her shoulders drooped.

"Thanks," he said. "After you, Wendy."

Wendy stepped through, and Mabel seemed to see her, because all at once she jumped up, a huge grin on her face.

"Oh, one thing before you go, Pines kid—" the woman said.

He turned toward her. "What?"

She grabbed his upper arms, pulled him close and gave him a hot kiss, her lips really burning against his.

Then she pushed him away, grinning wickedly. "Just to show you what you missed by letting your girlfriend jump the gun on the flame thing! Get out of here, you!" She slapped him hard on the butt, and he jumped through the shimmering oval opening, out of the light, into the night.


	16. Chapter 16

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 16, 2016)**

* * *

 **16: Keep Smiling Through**

Dipper lost his footing and skidded on the dew-wet grass, then fell forward, catching himself on outflung hands. He still hit the ground hard enough to _oof_ the air out of his lungs and lay there with his chest heaving before he felt Wendy pulling him up and gasped in a breath. "Dip, you OK?"

"Yeah," he said. "Just got the wind knocked out of me. She pushed me!" The air felt cool after the desert-like heat of the other dimension, and it held the familiar woodsy scent of pine and redwood trees. As he stood, up, he realized that where the scissor-woman hit him, his butt actually hurt, as if she'd whacked him hard and with more than just her hand.

Mabel was dancing around them in the dark. "You're back, you're back, you're back!" She hugged Dipper and then Wendy and then Dipper again and then danced a little more, until, in a lightning change of mood, she scolded: "Why didn't you tell me to come with you, dummies? It would've been different with Mabel in charge!"

"What's happening?" Ford's distant voice, coming from around the corner of the Mystery Shack. Dipper felt a little more oriented now, and realized that the strange woman in orange had scissored a pathway that led to the dark side of the house—the roof lights and parking-lot lights were all on the far side, and the Shack showed as a dark silhouette against the diffused silvery glow.

"They're here! They're OK!" Mabel bawled back.

Wendy put her arm around Dipper's waist and squeezed. "You steady?"

"I'm all right," Dipper said. "Just maybe a little dizzy. You?"

"I'm fine, dude," Wendy said. They could hear Stan's voice, now, as the two elder Mystery Twins seemed to be fighting for the lead in getting to the new arrivals. "What happened?" Stan demanded, still thirty steps away.

"We're all right, Stan!" Wendy called back. Chuckling, she patted Dipper on the rear. "Uh-oh!"

Dipper had felt the cool touch of her palm in an unexpected place. — _Whoa! Is my butt bare?_

 _Dipper, feels like you got a big hole in the seat of your pants! And in your underwear, too!_ And Wendy gave him a little pinch to prove it.

— _Quick, stand behind me_!

Wendy moved into position just as beams from both Stanley's and Stanford's flashlights hit them. "I'm so glad you're back and unharmed!" Ford said. "You are unharmed, aren't you?"

"Fine, fine," Dipper said, though now he was shivering, either from the cool night or from reaction to all they'd been through.

Stan, Gideon, and Ulva stood just behind Ford. "You knuckleheads! Why'd you even go out there in the middle of the night? You know Gravity Falls can get dangerous!"

"We had to!" Dipper said, leaning back against Wendy. "Grunkle Ford can tell you the whole story!"

"We kept Billy from shaking hands with the statue," Ulva said in her soft voice.

"And what's the big deal with shakin' a stupid statue's hand?" Stan demanded.

Ford turned his flashlight on his brother. "Stanley—remember when you tricked Bill—in his Cipher form—into shaking your hand?"

Stan squinted into the beam. "Kinda, mostly 'cause you told me the story so many times. When I try to remember it, I don't' know how much is in my brain and how much is just what you said to me."

The flashlight swiveled back to Dipper and Wendy. "Let's get these kids inside. I'll want to check them out in my lab."

"Um—gotta go to the bathroom first," Dipper said hastily. Wendy was slyly patting him in a place not suited for public patting, bare as it was.

"Me too!" Wendy said. She pulled off Dipper's sports jacket—she had been wearing it ever since discovering she had morphed into a topless centaur-unicorn shape—and Dipper grabbed it and tied the sleeves around his waist so it hung behind him like a reverse apron.

"Plus, I think I ripped my pants," he said.

"Well—go and take care of things, and then report to me in the gift shop!" Ford said. "Oh—be quiet, please. Billy Sheaffer is asleep in the spare bed in the attic."

"Yeah, I'll just—gotta go," Dipper said. He and Wendy hurried in ahead of the others and took the stairs two at a time.

"You really have to take a whiz?" Wendy whispered at the top of the stairs.

"No, just an excuse. Uh—"

"I know where you keep your jeans folded," she said. "I'll slip in and grab you a pair, so's you won't have to turn on the light and wake him up. Get in the bathroom, and don't forget to flush before you leave, or they'll all get nosy."

"Underwear too," Dipper said.

"Uh-uh. Don't want to rummage around too much. Just go commando."

"But I—" she put her finger to her lips and silently slipped into his bedroom. "—never do that," he finished lamely but more quietly. He went into the bathroom and suddenly discovered he did need to go, so he did.

In a few seconds, Wendy tapped on the door and he opened it. "Here you go," she said, handing the jeans to him. "Turn around, let me see."

"Wendy!"

"Come on, it's curiosity, not lust!"

Reluctantly, he turned. "Right in the middle," she said. "And it's shaped like a hand. And it's hard to tell, but I think she might have branded you with a mild burn, too!"

"I'll change," Dipper said. In the bathroom, he tried to get a look in the mirror, but the single mirror wasn't conducive to bottom-gazing, and he gave up. But both his pants—dressy pants, too, that he'd have to replace so his mom wouldn't ask questions when they returned home at the end of the summer—and his boxer briefs had a curiously hand-shaped burn all the way through the fabric. He donned the jeans and remembered to flush.

"Think I'd better visit the facility too," Wendy said when he came out. "Hide the evidence, Dip."

He wadded the ruined underwear and pants up and set them inside the door of the attic bedroom. He could hear Billy Sheaffer's deep, regular breathing. He eased the bedroom door shut. Then the toilet flushed again, and Wendy came out of the bathroom. "That's better. Does it hurt, Dip?"

"I can kind of feel it, but it's not all that painful."

"Looked very pink. Mild burn, probably. I'll check it out later."

"I think I'll live, but thanks anyway," he said.

She grinned at his uneasiness. "It'd be my pleasure, dude."

He couldn't help chuckling. "Let's go surrender to Grunkle Ford."

For an hour he kept them down in the lab, being scanned and monitored. Ford finally pronounced them whole and evidently unharmed physically and psychically, and then they joined the others upstairs. Soos and Melody had returned, and everyone but Melody was in the parlor, drinking coffee, all except for Grunkle Stan, who sat on the sofa with his arms crossed, looking grumpy. "Want a cup?" he asked. He made a face. "Decaf!"

"I got hot cocoa!" Mabel announced.

"I think we're good," Wendy said, and Dipper nodded.

Stan grunted. "Ford finished with you?"

"Yeah," Dipper said, sitting in the armchair— _Ouch! Little tender there—_ and suddenly feeling very tired.

"He says we check out," Wendy said, perching herself on the arm of his chair. "Some scratches and scrapes, but nothing serious."

"I'm so glad, dawg!" Soos said. "When that triangle dude gets mad, he gets, like, angry!"

"OK," Stan muttered. "We gotta wrap this coffee klatch up soon. Tomorrow Alex and Wanda are drivin' over for an early breakfast and to pick up Billy for the trip home. In a minute I'm gonna fire up the Stanleymobile an' drop Ulva and Gideon off. And then I'm gonna sleep for as long as Sheila will let me!" He looked up as Ford, coming in with a cup of decaf, stood slump-shouldered in the doorway. "You better turn in soon, too, Poindexter. You look beat."

"Just—reaction," Ford said. "And now I have something else to keep an eye on. I've been thinking. What we ought to do is build a Faraday cage over the Cipher effigy. I can construct it not only to keep anyone stumbling across the statue at a safe distance, but also to ground any para-electromagnetic effects. A kind of—metal tent, if you will. Of course, the effigy may be deactivated—Wendy chopped its arm off—"

"I did?" Wendy asked, sounding surprised. "I wasn't sure I even hit it!"

"Oh, yes, right where the elbow would be, if Cipher had something you could call a real elbow. Strange—the cut-off part apparently vanished. My theory is that it contained a build-up of paranormal power, and when severed from the source, the power consumed it in a desperate attempt to transfer itself to Billy. Only he was no longer within range—the explosive release had blown him about twenty feet, but the immediately following implosion—the force was like a tsunami, first going out, then returning with a vengeance—caught the two of you but missed him and dragged you into the Mindscape—"

"Ford," Stanley said gently, "shut your yap. OK, you lost the bet."

"The—oh! I'd forgotten," Ford said.

Grinning, Stan said, "Yeah, Brainiac here bet me we wouldn't get a surprise birthday party, just a family get-together. So now he has to pay off! When do you wanna hit Vegas, Sixer?"

Sighing, Ford said, "Not for a couple of weeks. I have too much to do here. But we'll set something up for early July. Three days we said?"

"Four. Three nights, four days. The old casino team is back, baby! You figure the odds, I hit the tables. We'll leave the girls home, tell 'em it's a boys' holiday. Then when we come back loaded, we'll take 'em someplace real nice."

Ford nodded and smiled—a little wearily, but warmly. Then he said, "Gideon. Ulva. I have been remiss in not thanking you. You were very generous and very brave, and you have my gratitude."

"Aw," Gideon said. "You're welcome, Stanford."

"What did you two do?" Wendy asked.

Gideon told the story, in surprisingly modest terms, winding up with, "So my girl, she followed your trail, and then after the statue caused the explosion, we found the little boy and tried our best to find you."

"Gideon!" Mabel said. "That was incredibly brave!"

"Naw," he said, looking down. "I was real scared, to tell the truth."

"Yeah," Dipper said, "but you stuck it out anyway. That's brave." He smiled. "Hey, remember Weirdmageddon? You decided not to arrest Soos, Wendy, and me, but to lead your Discount Auto Warriors to fight Bill's forces? That was brave, too." He turned to Ulva. "I told Gideon then something I'd learned: you can't force somebody to love you. Best you can do is strive to be someone worthy of loving."

"He is worthy," Ulva said with a big smile.

"Aww," Gideon said, turning pink.

"Hah!" Mabel said, punching his shoulder. "Is that modesty I spy? You have changed so much!"

Soos yawned enormously, buck teeth gleaming. "I think I better turn in, dawgs. Busy day tomorrow! Got like six tour buses scheduled to stop before noon."

"Yeah," Stan said. "I gotta get these kids home, too."

"I'll walk down the hill with you," Ford said. "Although I don't know if Lorena already drove home—"

"She's there," Stan told him. "She may be nappin' in our guest room, but she wasn't about to run out on you. She must love you or some deal."

"I suppose," Ford said, smiling, "she must."

Wendy was yawning, too, and when the others left, Mabel said, "Wanna have a sleepover? The bed in my room's queen-sized."

"Maybe you'd better stay over," Dipper said. "It's past two, and you look too tired to drive. You'll just have to be back in six hours, anyway, and you have a change of clothes here."

"Talked me into it," Wendy said. "Only if Dad's mad tomorrow, Mabel, you gotta swear to me you'll tell him the truth. Otherwise he'll think I sacked out with Dipper."

Mabel did Dipper's trick of zipping her lip. "Your secret's safe with me!"

"Come on," Dipper said. "She's really gonna stay in the guest room with you. I have to go up and keep an ear open for Billy. If he woke up, he might—might try to, you know, get back to the clearing."

Mabel looked more serious. "I'll make sure the security locks are set. I'll hang the deadbolt keys up higher than he could reach."

"I think he'll be OK, though," Wendy murmured. "If that thing's arm's half gone—no way to shake its hand now."

"You look dead on your feet. Go ahead," Mabel said. "You guys have your good-night kiss. Then us girls need our beauty sleep."

"Sounds good to me," Wendy said with a sleepy smile.

And so, even with Mabel as an audience, Dipper and Wendy kissed.

And so—chastely—to bed.


	17. Chapter 17

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(June 16, 2016)**

* * *

 **17: Welcome Back, Welcome Back, Welcome Back**

Mabel woke up early on Thursday morning. She'd dreamed on and off all night—dreams of Teek, kisses and dances and walks under the stars, but those were mixed in with dreams of Billy Sheaffer wandering scared out of his mind and lost in darkness, with others of the Cipher effigy come to life, rising from the earth, shedding clumps and clods and laughing a horrible grating version of his normal crazy laugh, and still others of Wendy and Dipper appearing like magic, stepping out of the air and out of the night. Vivid dreams, they kept her on the edge of waking, and she felt as if for hours she'd been drifting along just under the surface.

Once awake, she got up quietly, trying not to disturb Wendy. In the soft light coming in through the window—a west-facing window, so morning light was diffused—Wendy lay on her stomach, her arms around a pillow, her cheek resting on it. Her red hair was down to her shoulders now. She wore her white undershirt and pink panties. The color surprised Mabel. Wendy didn't seem like a pink-panty kind of girl. But Mabel smiled wickedly, fleetingly thinking of taking a photo of Wendy just like that. Dipper would like to see such a sight.

However, remembering that photos could lead to problems, she refrained. Then, not bothering with robe or slippers, Mabel quietly left her bedroom and padded upstairs in her bare feet. She opened Dipper's bedroom door very gradually and quietly, like the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart," and peeked in.

Dipper lay fully clothed on his bed, sprawled on his back, head turned to the left, mouth open and drooling a little. Across the room, Billy was in her old bed, under a gray blanket, hunched up in a fetal position.

Mabel stepped on something soft, tch'ed her tongue at Dipper's jeans crumpled on the floor—wait a minute, he was in bed and fully dressed—she picked them up and saw the strange hole in the seat. It looked as if it had been scorched there by something as big as the palm of her hand. "What were you up to, Brobro?" Mabel asked the jeans, but of course they weren't talking. Mabel dropped the jeans in the floor, where she had found them.

* * *

Wendy had slept deeply, with no troubling dreams or nightmares. Mabel's getting up had roused her, though, and she swung her long legs off the bed, stood up, yawned, and stretched. Despite her deep slumber, she felt as if she needed another four hours of rest. "Man," she muttered. "It's like I was awake for three or four days!"

But nine and a half hours of work lay ahead, and it was already nearly seven-thirty, by Mabel's clock. Without putting on her shoes, but pulling on her muddy and twiggy jeans, Wendy went through the gift shop to her locker, took out her change of clothes, and then took a shower in the downstairs bathroom before changing.

Her face in the mirror showed stress lines under her eyes, like Dipper's. "Maybe I can catch up tonight," she muttered. She didn't even think about making the morning run—last night had been exercise enough.

She looked at her reflection as she brushed her hair and wondered how Dipper was feeling.

* * *

Dipper woke up about five minutes after Mabel had peeked in. He sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and became a little bit alarmed. Across the room, Billy lay hunched up beneath a blanket, head and all, and Dipper couldn't tell whether or not he was breathing.

He got up, pulled down the cover—Billy grunted and turned his head away from the light—and then Dipper breathed out a sigh of relief. He shook the younger boy awake—"Billy! Gotta get ready for Mom and Dad to pick you up."

"Oh, thanks," Billy said, blinking. He got up and rubbed his good eye. "I guess I ought to change clothes."

"You'll have to wait until they get here," Dipper said. "You didn't bring extra clothes with you to the sleepover."

"Oh, yeah." Billy scratched his head, ruffling his messy blond hair. "I don't remember even coming over last night. Did we have fun?"

Dipper smiled and said truthfully, "Well—by the time you got here, you were pretty much asleep. That's OK, though. You had a long day yesterday."

Billy yawned. "The party was fun. I'm sorry I didn't get to see the stuff Mabel talks about."

Dipper checked his clock. Seven twenty-eight. "You saw a couple of Gnomes, anyway. And if you go outside right now, you can probably see a few huge bats flying over. They start a little before the sun rises and go back to their roosts as the day begins."

The two of them went downstairs—Dipper heard the shower and guessed that Mabel or Wendy was bathing—and then the boys went out on the museum porch. The sky was blue and pink and clear, and a fresh breeze felt cool and smelled of pines. "Just keep looking up," Dipper advised. Sure enough, in less than a minute a flight of three eye bats fluttered past high overhead, a little too far away for Billy to see that they were essentially all wings and eyeballs. "They're big!" Billy said.

"Yep, but they live on fruit, so they're pretty harmless. But I know where there's a tree that traps woodpeckers and eats them. Like a Venus' flytrap, but lots bigger. And high up in the Valley there's a little patch of geysers, like in Yellowstone Park, but not as spectacular. And a cave that looks like it's lined with gemstones. Maybe the next time you come up we can go see some of the other sights."

"Yeah. I wish I could stay longer."

"Well," Dipper said, "you'll have to clear it with your mom and dad. Maybe later in the summer, or maybe next summer."

"Yeah. I like Gravity Falls, though. It feels sort of, um."

"Sort of what?" Dipper asked.

Shyly, Billy said, "I was going to say 'magical.' But that's a dorky word."

"No," Dipper said. "It's a good word."

* * *

They all had breakfast, Mr. and Mrs. Pines showed up, Billy took a quick shower and changed clothes, and then they said their goodbyes. "I'm glad we came," Mrs. Pines said. "Ford and Stanley are looking so good!"

"They take care of themselves, Mom," Mabel said. "You know, an hour of bike riding a day wouldn't hurt Dad and you, either." She reached for her third serving of pancakes.

Soos, grinning and already in his Mr. Mystery costume, said, "Nice to have you up, Billy. Say, dawg, tell you what: As a going-home present, go and pick out something for yourself from the gift shop. It's on the house. Anything you want, dude! As long as it's under, like, twenty dollars!"

Mabel nudged Billy. "Me, I'd go for a grappling hook! Come on, let's see what's available."

She took him into the gift shop.

* * *

Wanda and Alex walked out to look at the totem pole, and they asked Wendy if she'd take their photo there with Dipper and Mabel. Dipper hauled Mabel from the gift shop, where Billy was still trying to make up his mind, and then Wendy obliged, using both Alex's camera and her phone. Mabel took Dad to look at the Bottomless Pit. Dipper went inside to set up the cash register for the day's tourists.

But Wanda took Wendy aside. "How are you and Dipper getting along?" she asked quietly.

"Fine," Wendy said.

"Do you go on dates with him?"

Wendy glanced at her. "You mean, like, to the movies sometimes, or to have a meal in one of the restaurants? Or go to an occasional dance? Yes, I do."

"I'm not going to scold you," Wanda said, smiling. "But, Wendy, remember, he can get very attached."

"Like a crush?" Wendy asked, smiling. "I've had 'em, too, Mrs.—I mean, Wanda. I think he and I understand our feelings pretty well."

Wanda sighed. "I'm trying not to pry. Let me know if—well, if you need any advice, or—I don't mean to butt into your business, really I don't, but I know you don't have a mother."

"It's all right," Wendy said. "I promise you, we'll let you know if anything earth-shaking develops."

"That's really all I ask," Wanda said. "Dipper and Mabel will be off to college next year. I have to let go, I know that. It's just—well, if you ever have children, you'll understand."

"Thanks, Wanda," Wendy said.

She almost said more— _Look, one of these days me and Dipper will sit down with you and tell you lots of things you never knew about Gravity Falls and about us. And you probably won't believe them at first, because who would believe that a couple of kids and their great-uncles saved the universe? Who would think that a ridiculous story like the Sumerween Trickster could be true? Or that Dipper would become a hero to the Manotaurs for helping when one of their own was hurt? Or that Fiddleford's wife had to be rescued from an alien? Or the Bunker? Or that time Dipper was willing to sacrifice himself to save everybody else? Or—all the weirdness?_

 _Who would believe that a dork and a mischief-loving tomboy girl more than two years older than him could even—fall in love?_

Wendy thought this, but didn't say it.

There would be time later to say it all. And, yes, in time Wanda Pines would believe.

For now, however, Wendy knew she had said enough.

* * *

After twenty or thirty minutes of agonized comparison shopping, Billy picked out a dreamcatcher. Dipper explained what it was supposed to do, and Billy said, "I like it a lot. Will it really stop bad dreams?"

"If you do your part," Dipper said. "You have to believe in it really hard."

Billy nodded, staring at the souvenir and smiling.

The Shack advertised it as an authentic Ojibwe _asabikeshiinh_ , guaranteed to ensnare any nightmares before they could disturb the sleeper. And who knows, perhaps an Ojibwe shaman did fashion the net woven on a willow hoop and decorated with beads and feathers and, in the very center, a small yellow triangle of glass. Someone had made it by hand. "Is this under twenty dollars?" Billy asked Dipper, sounding anxious.

"It sure is," Dipper said. "I'll put it in a bag for you." He took it from Billy and surreptitiously tore off the little price tag that Billy had not noticed: $75.00. Dipper could make up the difference, and anyway, he knew the Shack's wholesale price—the price Soos paid for the dreamcatchers—was eighteen bucks a pop. Tourists liked them—being hand-made, no two dreamcatchers were completely alike.

The yellow glass triangle bothered Dipper a little, but—

Heck, Billy had slept in the attic, right under the triangle window. And triangles were everywhere in the Shack, even triangles with eyes in them. And, come to that, they were on dollar bills, too.

So Dipper bagged the purchase and made a mental note to put the difference in the till, although that would be nearly his whole week's paycheck from the Shack. Sixty dollars a week wasn't much—but it was sixty dollars more than Grunkle Stan had ever paid him!

Dad came back in, had a last cup of coffee, Mom and Wendy came in chatting, and at about a quarter to nine, Dad said, "Well, we'd better get on the road. It's a long drive back to California!"

Dipper and Mabel hugged their parents, Mabel hugged Billy, and they saw them into the RAV4. Wendy advised Mr. Pines of a shortcut via Klamath Falls to let them see some of the scenery and avoid the congestion around Portland before getting back on I-5. The Pines parents and Billy set off, waving, and Wendy, Dipper, and Mabel watched them drive down to the highway and make the left turn.

Mabel muttered, "This isn't over, is it?"

Dipper put his hand on her shoulder. "What, me being mad at you for talking Billy into making the trip? Or the whole Bill Cipher thing?"

"I dunno," Mabel said. "Both, I guess. I messed up, didn't I?"

"I'm not going to yell at you, Sis," Dipper said. "You didn't know that Billy would get—I don't know, _lured_ is the word, I guess—out to the effigy. And he's going to find out about his background sooner or later, no matter what you or I or anybody can do. So that part's over, at least for now. You can forget about it. But the Bill Cipher part—no, that's not over yet. It's probably going to go on. It may get worse."

"Kinda makes my gripe with Teek look small," Mabel said.

"That," Wendy told her kindly, "is something you and Teek will have to work out. Don't push too hard, too soon. You've got the rest of the summer to think it over."

"Yeah, I know," Mabel said.

"Well-p," Dipper said, glancing out the gift-shop window, "here comes our first tour bus of the day. To your posts!"

Mabel took a deep breath. While Dipper and Wendy went inside and Soos stood on the porch in black suit, fez, eyepatch and wielding a cane, she went to meet the bus.

"Hi, gentletourists!" she said as they came stepping down. "Welcome to the Mystery Shack, the mysteriousest place on Earth! Have we got things for you to see and do! You'll be amused! You'll be amazed! Come on in and enjoy the wonders!"

And for the next few hours, nobody thought much about Cipher or the narrow escape of young Billy Sheaffer.

Nobody on the earthly plane, at least. But elsewhere . . . .


	18. Chapter 18

**Welcome Back, Cipher**

 **(The Equivalent of June 16, 2016)**

* * *

 **18: Some Sunny Day**

Jheselbraum the Unswerving again confronted the Axolotl. Time did not matter to them, but we could say they met a half-hour after Alex and Wanda Pines, with their passenger Billy Sheaffer in the back seat, left the Valley and turned south onto US 97 for the drive through Central Oregon, toward Weed, California, where they planned to turn onto Interstate 5 for the long haul down to Oakland and Piedmont.

Now, it could have been a million years before or a billion years later. Time does not work the same way with immortals as it does for earth-bound humans. But we'll say it was soon after the RAV4 turned onto the highway. That simplifies things.

"You know the wretched creatures are at it already," she told the Axolotl, without so much as a polite "hello."

"I do not know anything that I do not know," the Axolotl said, which might have been its idea of a joke, or a Zen koan, or the simple truth. Maybe all three at once.

The Oracle gestured and a picture appeared, shimmering in the ether between the two beings. It showed something that looked like a stick, smooth, round, and angled. Bugs shuffled on it, creeping to the end, which looked broken, pausing, and then flying away. They were the gold bugs, which Wendy had mistaken for rain beetles. They crept to the broken end of the stick, deposited a little gold, and then flew away for more.

Already the stick was growing—a quarter of an inch of it was now solid gold.

"They're mending the cut," the Oracle said. "They're going to rebuild the arm and the hand."

"You are angry with the insects?" asked the Axolotl.

The Oracle gestured, and the vision vanished. "No. I think I am angry with you. For permitting this! The child could have grasped the stone hand!"

The Axolotl did not sound perturbed: "The Wendy was there with the foreordained weapon to sever the arm in time."

Telling herself that she should not show her anger, the Oracle retorted, "It's not proper to call her 'the' Wendy. The girl is Wendy. That's her name."

"The girl is a woman."

The Oracle massaged four of her eyes. Sometimes even an immortal interdimensional being can get a headache. "I had believed the Cipher effigy could not be destroyed—"

"It has not been destroyed."

"Or damaged, I was about to say!"

"What is damage?" the Axolotl asked.

"Well—a chopped-off arm, for one thing!" the Oracle snapped. Arguing with the Axolotl was like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

The Axolotl said, "Let us reason. Had Wendy not been present with her unique weapon at that exact moment in time, the child Billy would have touched the hand of the effigy. The darkness would have flowed into him, is that not so?"

"You know it is. And that's why you—we both—were irresponsible!"

"Bear with me. At present Billy is too young to resist the darkness, is he not? Yes, you know he is. One day it will be fair to test him, when he is older and knows himself. Not yet. Therefore, what happened when Wendy severed the arm is not damage, but a restoration of balance. The darkness is calling the beetles, and the beetles do their work with no awareness or ill intent. Are they evil?"

"They are insects, without free will and without sentience," the Oracle said. "I cannot call them evil."

"Is the effigy itself evil?"

"It is the _conduit_ of evil. It is the way the chaos and malevolence of Cipher can enter the soul of his reincarnation. You know that!"

"We both do," agreed the Axolotl.

"If the child Billy grows old enough and comes to know himself, and if he then touches the thing—will he fall to the evil?"

The Axolotl did the extradimensional equivalent of a who-can-say? shrug. "The book of his future is unwritten."

The Oracle closed all her eyes but one. Free will. The Axolotl _could_ contravene free will, but chose never to do so. And the future was hidden from her, for all her eyes. She said, "On this day, the Pines family will cross a high bridge over the Crooked River. Should something happen to send their conveyance over the side, the fall would be three hundred feet. None of the people in their vehicle will survive. I could make that happen."

"Yes. You have that much power."

Without asking the direct question, for she doubted the Axolotl would bother to answer, she said, "I wonder if it would be the proper thing to do!"

"That would certainly resolve the question of whether Billy Sheaffer would succumb to evil."

"Oh!" the Oracle said, her voice agitated. "Don't be coy, please. I know you! If Billy becomes the demonic form of Bill Cipher again, you will blot out the entire Earth rather than let him seize control of Dimension 46'\\!"

"That would be my only course of action."

Now she could not hold back the query: "Would my arranging the premature deaths of three people be worse than your eradicating billions of them?"

"Such questions are not for me to answer. But consider: What you suggest would certainly prevent the demonic Bill Cipher from being re-embodied. However, it would also prevent the soul of Bill Cipher from redeeming itself and being worthy of a—what do the Earth children call it? A do-over in his own dimension. I could send him back to the moment of his aberration into chaos. This time I would expect him to strive for creation, not destruction. To quench the fire he ignited before even lighting it."

"I don't think he is capable of remorse," the Oracle said.

"Then if you want to cause the automobile to plunge off the bridge, you certainly have the power to do so."

"But—what would that do to the Pines children? To Wendy? To Stanford and his brother? It would give them terrible agony!"

"Such a loss would indeed cause fractures in time itself," the Axolotl said. "And rupture their relationships irreparably."

"The alternative is to let the Pines parents and Billy return safely. To let Billy grow up. To let Dipper and Mabel befriend him and—without even knowing exactly what they are doing or how to accomplish it—to try to make him a responsible person. To tame the chaos within him!"

"That would not be a bad thing. I must admit, though, I do like a little chaos—but not a chaotic universe."

"Do they even have a chance, though?"

The Axolotl unbent a little, the merest fraction. "Mabel alone, no. She has a touch of chaos within her. Not too much, but enough to be playful and random. Dipper alone, no. He is too controlled, too orderly, to bring off the miracle. Together, as twins, combining their natures and their gifts—yes, they have a chance."

"A large chance or a small one?"

"It is a chance."

"You are the most infuriating guardian of reality that ever existed!"

"And the only one," the Axolotl said.

"I will leave you now," the Oracle said, not rising, for she had not been sitting—or standing, or lying, either, because this whole meeting took place not in physical reality but in between the dimensions, where directions had no meaning. "I have a bridge to visit."

"Have a good trip," the Axolotl said. "And think carefully before acting."

"The insects are rebuilding the statue," she pointed out.

"They have no choice. You do."

"Whatever I decide—I will doubt myself and hate the decision," she said.

"Existence is the scent of the rose and the pain of the thorn," the Axolotl said.

"Please, no more enigmatic statements. Farewell," she said. "One way or another, I will return to talk of this again."

"I'm always in."

* * *

It was some sunny day, all right—brilliantly clear blue sky, with no clouds, no haze, no smoke, no smog. It was a day of crystal clarity, a day you wished would just go on like that forever. All three of them were enjoying the drive and the scenery, the lush green forested hills, distant purple mountains, even gleaming snow packs high up, everything basking in the glorious sun.

Yes, sir, it was a day that made you glad to be alive.

The black RAV4 was not speeding, but even so, as the car approached the bridge high over the Crooked River, Alex Pines slowed to only about forty miles an hour. "Wow," he said. "Would you look at that! That's quite a gorge, Billy. The old bridge over there looks rickety. I'm glad they built a new one!"

And he drove out onto the span, being careful, not knowing what hung in the balance.

* * *

 _The End_

 **A Note of Apology:**

Man, I don't know what I did to bork Chapter 10, but it was a mess, and then when I tried to fix it, I had the original file mixed up with Chapter 1 for some reason (computer numbering, I guess). Anyway, I hope this straightens things out. I wound up having to deep-six everything from 10 through the end and then re-load all the files. Let me know if anything is still messed up! (February 4, 2018)


End file.
